


Gamble on a Little Sorrow

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Gen, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 06:43:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/846507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam wakes up in hospital after the events of <em>Jump the Shark</em>, his mother dead, his face cut up, and his right arm gone from the elbow. His life destroyed and out of his depth, he joins his new half-brothers on the road to the apocalypse. They introduce him to Ellen and Jo, and Bobby; they teach him how to shoot, and lie, and be a Winchester. But Sam and Dean are dealing with their own demons, and the cost of war is heavy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gamble on a Little Sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2013 SPN J2 Big Bang. Betad with great patience and kindness and accuracy by [tfw_ftw](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tfw_ftw) \-- many thanks! Thanks also to the mods of spn_j2_bigbang and omgspnbigbang for their hard work and enthusiasm. 
> 
> It was a pleasure to work with [Gryph](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryph/pseuds/Gryph), who was very gentle with this first timer and created absolutely wonderful art. I am so excited and grateful to include it! Please visit the full art post at <http://gryphon2k.livejournal.com/260035.html> or <http://archiveofourown.org/works/849236> and give Gryph ALL the feedback!
> 
> This fic also has a mixtape, which is available [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/850540).
> 
> FURTHER WARNINGS. If you are concerned by the Major Character Death warning and would like more information, please view the end notes. This fic deals with themes of grief and loss. It has an instance of a homophobic slur.

  


 

**Part 1. They're not exactly glamorous people.**

It takes him a while to get out of it, a long time drifting dreamless, a long time too to get over the terror of perception. Even insensible, some part of him knew.

They don't talk about her and that's how he knows for sure; it's the first thing he knows because he sees it on their careful, pitying faces, light shined in his eyes and gentle questions about how his head feels (cold) and if he's thirsty (yes). They tip ice chips into his mouth and look really, really sorry for him but it hardly matters if his mother is dead, his poor fucking mom who loved better than anyone he ever knew bleeding out hard and pointless in the back seat of a car. He feels something wild in his chest start to spiral out, crowd up his throat. He can't breathe.

And then they keep talking and it strikes him there's _more._

::

The worst bit is that because of his ribs he has to sleep on his back and the bandage over his kidneys feels the size of a boulder. It's the kind of uncomfortable that turns into pain but he can't do anything about it; every time he rocks a bit to his right to relieve the pressure he goes too far because his arm just is. not. there.

::

They took him apart in Minneapolis, flying him there after he was dropped at the local Emergency, and he's grateful it's too far away for many visitors, and that none of the nurses worked with his mom, don't look at him at see Adam Milligan, Kate's boy, cut up now and mutilated and alone. But the requests still start a couple of days after he wakes up and is moved out of ICU: Rupananda wants to see him pretty bad the nurses say, sits in the patients' lounge every afternoon with her textbooks and tissues, such a good-hearted girlfriend, and her mom asks too, and Mrs Poole, and Gary and Todd and the Gianottis. The more he refuses the more his room fills up with flowers and stuffed toys, mockingly bright and cute and cheerful, until he has to start asking the nurses to throw them away.

The others he can't refuse: his surgeon who comes by with a parade of students like ducklings behind him and sniffs at the cast around his stump; the social worker; the physio; the police, who never have any new information, who can't find the dogs that mauled them, can't find the good samaritans who dropped them off, can't even find the site where they were hurt. He can't remember, he tells them. He was at his car, and fell, and woke up here.

::

They shift him back to Windom after a week or so, an endless two hours in the back of an ambulance even though he could sit up fine in a car, and his heart plummets at the familiar sight of the hospital. He's been here so often, knows the particular dinge of its corridors, the curve of its cafeteria walls, knows so many of the nurses and he cringes whenever they come in, unable to handle the way they look at him like they've lost someone too.

But he uses them to send messages out to Mrs Poole, tells them to organise the funeral themselves, unable to summon up the energy to care what it looks like or how it goes. He can hardly bear the present, and can't imagine after; after this limbo, to get a taxi home and walk into a blank, shapeless future. It's impossible. No-one seems to understand that, not the counsellor or the plastic surgeon or the lawyers or Mrs Poole with her note saying how nice the service was, how many people had turned out to say goodbye and how he needs to have faith that she is in a better place now. When he unfolds it a little memento card falls out, his mom's picture in monochrome, some dates and a stupid quote and he tosses it in a drawer next to his bed, something else he can't be bothered caring about.

They keep trying to teach him how to care for it, his _stump_ , his _residual limb_ , how to desensitise it and mobilise the scar, how to help someone put on the shrink bandage. He does what they say like a good boy and spends the rest of the time staring out his window, his shitty vista of the parking lot and the ass end of the nursing home and the sky, grey and dour. He keeps the blinds open permanently, needing that view every time he hitches himself back into bed, lets himself go with the clouds and the stars into nothing until it's all put away, the unnatural heft of his body, the instincts that always send the wrong arm out, the cramp that curls his missing thumb into his missing palm until it feels like the missing joints will pop, the tight line across his cheek and jaw. 

It's numbing, a relief, but they never let him keep it. He is always brought back, interrupted by the nurses with their pain meds, pestering always for his pain levels, to take him to the toilet, get his meal order in, draw his blood. The ones that don't know him look at him with a distant sort of base rote pity, and he often finds he has tears drying on his cheek, falling away from him without his consent.

::

The day they take the staples out he has a visitor. He's tall and his name is Sam and he just walks in, doesn't seem to give a crap that Adam's a cripple, doesn't bother with sympathetic noises. He says that he and his brother found Adam and his mom in the crypt and took them straight to the hospital. Adam had been half-conscious and rambling and his mom never woke up.

"What were you doing in a crypt?" Adam asks.

"We were looking for you," the guy says. "What do you remember?"

The part Adam best remembers is when his twin had slapped him awake for the third or fourth time, made the blood start fresh, and then his mom had come in ignoring Adam screaming at her to run, licked Adam's face and said _looks like your dad got out easy, kid,_ licked down his arm, kissed the pad of his thumb and took his fingers in her mouth. That had been after his cheek, but before he'd seen his real mom.

"Not much," Adam says. "Why were you looking for me in a cemetery?"

"Because that's where ghouls live," the guy says, watching him, sharp, and Adam takes another look at him, the circles under his eyes and his ratty jeans and boot leather worn thin and bald, and realises that he's kind of familiar.

"Listen, Adam," he says, leans forward intent and serious. "There're some things I want to tell you. Are you okay with that?"

Adam says yes.

::

They'd known he had another family of course, that he had two kids -- my boys, he used to say, gruff and proud -- but they hadn't cared to know names or jobs or see pictures and John had been fine with that, happy to keep vast swathes of his life locked away. Adam got why now.

The older one's name is Dean but he isn't around much and Adam's not interested in chatting to him anyway. He recognises that jacket. The last time he saw it his mom had been holding on to the lapels, leaning up to kiss John on the cheek. He'd shaken John's hand, and John had told her to keep up the good work, and now they were both dead.

He lets Sam in though and Sam takes it seriously, sits in the chair and talks himself dry for as long as Adam can listen, which isn't very long, spinning straightforward stories straight out of horror movies, shapeshifters and vampires and ghosts. Ghouls, in their backyard, that John had hunted, incompletely, that Sam and Dean had killed without trial, cutting off their heads and burning the bodies in an unmarked grave. At the end of most of these sessions Dean sticks his head around the door, darts an embarrassed glance at Adam and says _c'mon, Sam, time to go_ in tones increasingly clipped and pissy as the days go on.

“What's his fucking problem?” Adam makes the mistake of asking, three days in, and Sam flashes grim and dangerous before widening his scope to the apocalypse, demons and angels and Hell that Dean was apparently in. Dean, who had been murdered by their enemies, and dragged to Hell, and rescued by an angel. 

This is the tipping point into insanity that Adam has half been waiting for, and he averts his gaze from the dark hold of Sam's eyes, a little embarrassed for them both. It's nice outside, sun and clouds, streets surely full of kids and happy dogs and lawnmowers and Ru waiting for him somewhere. 

“Oh, Adam,” Sam says, on an awkward breath. “Castiel can't heal you, or bring her back. I'm sorry. We don't know any... We can't do anything for you. Like that.”

Adam nods, breathes, lets go. It sounds about right. He gives Sam a half-shrug and gets a long, measuring gaze in return, direct and intense. He's only a few years older than Adam but he looks more like a man right now than most men Adam has met, a granite to him that seems bedrock, certain and reliable.

“When something hurts you that bad, when it hurts your family, there's no way to fix it. There's no way to make it better. But you can make it pay for what it's done, and you can stop it doing it again. Here.” Sam puts a hand behind his back and comes out with a gun, leans forward, elbows on knees, intent. Adam almost chokes at the sight of it.

“This is a Beretta 9 millimetre. Safety, on, off. Mag release. Magazine. Chamber. You press here and twist with your thumb. Slide. Watch the spring. Pull that out. Press, lift. And then in reverse.”

He lays it in Adam's hand. It's warm and not very heavy and it there's no way to hold it that's not ridiculous and clumsy.

“You should practice,” Sam says, and he does, frustrated middle-of-the-night fumbling, fingers weak and disobedient. He tangles it up in the blankets so the spring doesn't shoot pieces everywhere and the nurses cast disturbed looks at the grease stains; gets bruises on the insides of his knees trying to keep the grip steady. He shoots imaginary bullet after imaginary bullet. 

Sam is impressed with his progress. Adam asks him what the point is, when he's never going to be able to reload quickly enough to be a threat.

“We're gonna get you good enough that you won't have to reload. But if one clip's not enough, you find something else. These things that we fight, Adam. They're evil. You use whatever you can get your hands on.”

Adam imagines being taken again, that precipitous breathless drop when they'd pulled his legs from under him, clubbing this time with the pistol grip, with crumbling crypt stones, his knuckles, his head, his bones, pulping their faces and their awful human teeth. He chokes on their blood, now, in a fucking hospital bed, winded and curdled with tears on his cheeks. 

When he can breathe again he looks at Sam, ashamed, and realises that Sam hasn't even noticed, eyes down, rubbing gently at the inside of his wrist.

“You do whatever you can,” he says, voice walking down a road that Adam guesses is Hellbound, “and you make them pay.”

::

Dean must feel guilty because he comes in the next morning and sits down, shifting uncomfortably. He doesn't look like a man who's been to Hell. He looks like a jock just come off a bender, and he says a bunch of crap that Adam has been trying to avoid, _how are you going_ and _your girlfriend's outside she misses you, she seems nice_ and _sorry about your mom._ Adam doesn't bother to answer and gets ten minutes of blessed silence, follows a pigeon dark against the sky down to the asphalt where it pecks searchingly, ceaselessly.

Outside in the parking lot, half-hidden by a muddy SUV, is John's car, the old black one, trunk stretching out like it's too big to be contained by such suburban nonsense. He remembers seeing it for the first time, growling monstrously up his street as he waited in the front room, his mom hovering behind. John had shown him the bench seats in the front and it had blown his twelve-year-old mind.

"So our dad used to take you to baseball games, huh?”

It surprises Adam until he remembers that Sam and Dean had been fooled by the ghouls at first, had spent two days in the company of the thing wearing his face, had walked around their house and sat at their kitchen table, had brushed by his graduation cap in the hall, had been in his mom's room, had touched her bed and seen the picture of John Winchester she kept on the nightstand.

"That, ah, that must have been nice. We never, Dad never. Closest we ever got was whacking Chupacabra kittens with a tree branch. Nasty little suckers." Dean grins, like it's a funny joke. The guy's voice is sandpaper, sick and black across open wounds and Adam is diminished now, he can't be expected to contain this bullshit. It is too much.

"I hope he died bad," he says, does his best to get the words out clear and slow, stitches tugging at his cheek.

Dean hunches like he's been shot, leeched of colour. He rubs a shaking hand across mouth and leaves without looking back, doesn't show his face for three days, three days of Sam's crackling impatience and pissed off sighs, constant vague distraction, delay in his responses and distance in his eyes, it's nearly a relief when Dean shows up again carrying coffee and the scent of stale whiskey and BO, and smiles like nothing happened.

::

Adam doesn't care that they're there when his care team checks his wounds, the one an inch above where his elbow used to be, the neat scars on his back and sides, the jag bisecting his cheek. The doctors make approving noises and commend him on his rehab techniques and Sam looks satisfied but Adam can tell Dean is freaking out and he gets worse when the doctors leave and Sam starts in on preparations, what to tell the cops, what to tell the doctors and lawyers and realtors, gives Adam a list of suggestions for what he should bring with him. They are going to drive the country, Sam says, and they are going to kill some monsters, and they are going to stop the apocalypse.

“We can come back as often as you like,” Sam says. “You'll have appointments...your friends...”

“I'm never coming back.” He won't even have to go back to the house if he doesn't want, or see anyone at all, won't have to whittle himself away on the expectations of the people who think they love him, who think there's something left to love.

"This isn't going to end well," Dean says, edge of something splintering in his voice.

"Either way, it'll end," Adam says, and Sam's eyes are steady on him, firm and practical and approving.

::

Rupananda must be staying locally, he realises, couldn't possibly be driving up every day from Madison or Milwaukee, because she can't or won't get the hint and every morning is loitering in the hospital somewhere. The nurses, who all seem creeped out by his two new friends, feel sorry for her, with her soft face and long black hair and bag full of textbooks. They bug Adam all the time until eventually the young one, afternoon shift, just opens the door and ushers her in. Adam wants to strangle her but that'd be kinda difficult these days.

"Adam," Rupananda says, shock under her tentative smile as she runs her eyes over him. 

"I don't want to see you any more, Ru," he says. "I get it, but that's how it's gonna be. Will you tell the others? I don't want to see anyone."

“You're not thinking straight,” she says, tears shining in her eyes, mouth trembling. “Oh Adam, your mom, I'm so sorry.”

“Ru, I'm done,” he says, flatly, hating her for forcing this on him. It's been two years, and it was good, but it's over. It couldn't be more obvious, and still she steps towards him, puts her hand on his knee.

"Adam, it's gonna be all right. We'll get through this."

"You sound like a third-rate Lifetime movie," Adam says, and she crumples. She was expecting someone she knew, he gets that, but he has nothing for her, and she shouldn't ask.

Half an hour later he looks down from the clouds to see Sam and Dean having an argument by the car. Dean hits Sam right as Sam is saying something, right in the middle of his face and Sam falls, shakes gravel from his palm and favours his knee as he stands, slapping away Dean's hand and then they're spitting words at each other, close and furious and Sam shoves Dean against the car and stalks around to the passenger door, gets in and slams the door hard.

It's the first time Adam has ever seen a real live fistfight. It's not exactly glamorous, but they're not exactly glamorous people.

 

**Part 2. We don't hook up with other hunters.**

The first day is a disaster. 

The staff are all happy about his discharge and congratulate him on doing so well. How lucky he was to have Dr Li as his surgeon, they say, and how lucky he was so young and healthy before. They give him prescriptions, and appointment cards, with the prosthetist, the plastic surgeon and social workers and counsellors, a dietician even, that he already knows he will never attend. They make him put follow-up scan dates in his phone, which he throws in the trash on the way out, and load him down with post-op care pamphlets and little books put out by support groups that Sam has read cover-to-cover twice already. He sends all his bears and balloons and fading flowers to pediatrics and oncology, taking only one thing from his room, fishing in his bedside drawer for it.

Adam doesn't know or care where they're going; for twenty minutes he enjoys the breeze on his face and for the rest of the drive his entire being is subject to the rumble and bump of the ancient suspension of the stupid ancient car that no one in this family is obviously capable of letting go. He grits his teeth and takes his pills and shuts the window, feverish and clammy, heavy pounding behind his eyes as Windom shrinks to nothing more than a dot on a map.

Sam and Dean are shitty with each other, a tense silence that Adam's not gonna break, lasting the whole hour to a junkyard outside Sioux Falls. It belongs to a guy named Bobby, a grizzled old redneck who opens the door and looks at them for a handful of seconds. 

"You found him, then."

And Dean says, 

"Fuck you Bobby," and spins on his heel and they head back to the car and Adam follows in a fog, appalled, this trucker-cap asshole so blasé about Adam's entire existence. Sioux Falls is less than two hours away. He's been here before, tons of times, driving through on the way to camp, bussing up for history class to visit the _USS South Dakota._ His Nan and Pop's fucking ashes had been scattered in the Palisades. He twists in his seat as Dean curves a sweeping line out of there; Bobby stands in the door, yelling something out at them until he disappears in the dust and Adam turns back to the front and catches Dean watching him in the rearview mirror, frown carved deep.

"Your dad kept shitty company," he says, mostly to see Dean flinch.

::

Around three they cruise into a small town Adam's never heard of and Dean slows down and starts looking around and Sam, fiddling with his phone, snaps,

"We've got hours yet, Dean," and Dean's shoulders in front of him look like they're carved out of stone. He slams into fourth and takes off over a pothole that bounces Adam's arm against his bags, edge of a book inside that hits his stump at an excruciating angle so he has to gasp and hunch over it until the pain ebbs.

They chase the sun another two hundred miles into the dark, hot hard-battled tears wiped away and dry by the time they pull into a motel, paint peeling and half the neon busted. He walks inside on rubbery legs and sits heavily on the nearest bed, and then wishes he hadn't let it show, Dean looking at him dubious and concerned. He stands up again but is just in the way; they step graceless and interrupted around him, laying out the protective routine Adam has heard about but will surely never get the hang of. His bones throb toes to teeth, his head is jabbing with the eye-strain of six hours of moving scenery, his hand has been cramping on and off for hours, and he is useless.

"I can do the sheets," he says, and touches the bed when he sees their blank faces. "You know, to," and his cheeks start to burn and he sits down again, rocking into the swayback mattress, picks at the fraying bedspread.

"That's mine," Dean says, strained. "Bed nearest the door is my bed."

Adam says nothing, keeps his eyes on the carpet, threadbare stains and burns and Dean and Sam with their salt and chalk aren't doing it any favours either. He shifts to the bed by the bathroom, lies down facing the wall. He knows they're having some kind of silent discussion about him, what a deadweight he is. They've been doing this since they were kids; for Sam's whole life. 

Some things are starting to make sense: that constant edge of regret in his dad's eyes. For Adam's thirteenth birthday his dad had taken him and his mom to see the Cubs at Wrigley, and they had stayed in a motel the night before, way better than this one. John had smiled the whole time, watching his mom snap fresh home-brought sheets over the beds, teasing Adam in his deep slow voice over his excitement at the little kettle and the coffee sachets, drawing a worn pack of cards out his bag and thrashing them at poker, Adam happy in a deep and terrifying way, looking from his dad to his mom, her hair falling past her shoulder as she chuckled and curved her body protectively, his big hands worming in to tickle her ribs and steal her cards. 

His stomach lurches.

"We need him, Dean," he hears Sam whisper, like he's not right there in the room. Silence, and then one of them goes outside and shuts the door. Adam hopes it's Dean. He hopes he never comes back and then he and Sam can buy a Toyota and travel in some fucking comfort.

In the morning he sits, stiff, lower back clamouring, as Sam changes his dressings and Dean removes all human traces from the room, wiping down taps and remotes, scraping symbols off the laminate. When he folds himself into the car again and settles a stolen pillow at his back he notices something weird about the leather, how smooth and clean and glossy it is compared to the seat in front of him, and when the reason hits it knocks the breath from his body, forces tears to his eyes and a sob from his throat. Dean turns around, startled, and looks awkward.

"I fixed it up," he says, like he wants Adam to thank him or something, and then Sam climbs in and they head off and Adam realises: this is his life now. Every morning he will climb into the seat where his mother lay dying and every night he will climb into a sagging, smelly, foreign bed, rinse and repeat for the rest of his miserable half-life, until something evil takes pity on him, comes along finishes the job.

::

In his dreams she's usually alive and awake, red meat still pumping blood through, fingers clutching out at him, and she doesn't love him anymore; she hurts too much for that. He has to say goodbye to her like that, when she can't even hear him, and every time he wakes with a bone-deep boundless ache in his chest, because he never even got that much.

::

They're driving west, something apocalyptic going on in Washington, and they seem to sense that he can't take any more eight-hour days, pacing themselves and stretching the drive out. For hours Sam will sit in the back seat with Adam and show him how to clean a gun or drill him on what'll kill what or fill him in on the end of the world. He yells at Dean to turn down the cock rock and takes Adam through their dad's crazy scrapbook of a journal, tells Adam about the things they've killed, evil clowns and nostalgic ghosts and _Deliverance_ nightmares who hunt people for fun.

Every story has a point, and Sam is keen to teach him. Sam knows that the only way to deal with something like this is to steel yourself and push on through, distracting yourself with the day-to-day. He is the only person to ever talk to Adam like an adult, like he deserves to know the truth. John had known; John had bought him a beer for his fifteenth birthday and said _you're a man now, son,_ and lied to his face. Sam wants Adam to be strong, to survive; he helps Adam with his stump and scars, buys him his supplements and helps him with the shrinker, and leaves him be the rest of the time.

Dean is just an asshole, always looking at Adam like he's an alien, wrong and unpredictable. He buys Adam salads for lunch, puts three sugars in his coffee, points out the biggest ball of yarn and other monuments to American vanity; shit like that until Adam snaps at him one day, _I'm not your stupid little brother_ and that seems to clear his eyes a little.

Adam is glad not to have his stiff, patronising attention, would rather be practising, typing and tying and writing and reloading a gun in a constant fumble, the impotence of his stump flapping about an eternal crucifixion. The orthopedic nurse had said that he would learn to use the stump like another hand; Adam remembers that all the time, trying to wash himself in the shower, trying to zip up a duffel, trying to open a beer, and it makes him laugh, bitter hopeless dregs that make even Sam look at him askance.

::

Mount Vernon is a bust. They've come here because birds are falling out of the sky, sparrows and finches bouncing like ragdolls, crows and pigeons and once a huge white owl landing heavy and broken in front yards and on pretty storefront porches. They pass a preacher crying out about the Rapture, and Sam takes them into churches and the homes of local kooks, alert, his head turning like he's trying to sniff out the devil, but there's no sulphur, no seals or demons. They talk to a professor at Seattle U who puts it down to a freak cold snap but even if it's not a seal, Adam can't help the feeling that it's related, like the world is trying to swing backwards into winter, to avoid what's coming. But that's impossible. The world should know by now: the next morning is always there waiting.

::

They're out of money because they didn't want to hustle in Windom so they steal their meals from gas stations and liquor stores, overripe bananas and packs of ramen and twizzlers and the booze to wash it down with, and Adam doesn't know how they got so huge and handsome on this diet because he feels worse every day. His pores fill with road grime and he starts to get breakouts on his jawline, stinging bloody frustration and a mortal fear of pockmarks every morning as he shaves, never able to get the razor moving easily with his left hand. His scar is healing well at least, curving in an inverted groove from his eyebrow around his cheekbone without pulling his eye or mouth out, the only fresh and pink part of him, the rest of him sunken and tired and bony.

Sam checks his stump twice a day and pronounces it well, the joins clean and close, with a deep, almost personal satisfaction. Adam expects to have painful and comical phantom limb issues but it's just a mundane feeling of presence that slips away when he tries to nail it down, and the cramp that lingers in his non-palm, sometimes sharp and often ignorable, always vulgar, one last part of him clinging to the old days like a sick joke.

::

They're in a bar and hear about a ghost in a liquor store down the road and on the way back to the motel they take Adam on their recon, saunter brazenly in under the suspicious eye of the clerk. Adam doesn't know if he looks older now, but he never gets carded any more.

“His first time,” Dean says with an arm around Adam's shoulder, throwing a cocky smile at the old guy. Dean takes him slowly through the store, explaining whiskey malts and wine coolers and surreptitiously checking the EMF meter, and at the end of the spirits aisle the machine explodes into noise and light and it scares the piss out of Adam, bottles of antifreeze vodka exploding right by his ear, thrown at him by someone, a _ghost,_ his drooling lopsided face sneering as Adam staggers back and falls on his ass. 

Dean yells, and though the plastic salt shakers by the tequila are their best and nearly only weapon and shared between the two of them -- Sam wandering vaguely out the door only two minutes ago -- they are aided by the fact that this raging ghost is also, somehow, vastly drunk and reeling, and their victory toast is lengthy and rich and taken on the run, the old guy screaming obscenities behind them.

At the motel Dean turns the TV on and leans back with a contented sigh, starts in on the next bottle, but Adam has had enough for now, the room starting to turn around him. He sits on a bench outside, staring across the lot out at the highway, cool night air mixed through with diesel fumes and cigarette smoke from the guy next door. It's just about the best Adam has ever felt, flying high on hard-won victory, re-living the perfect twist and flex of his arm, the arc of the salt as he'd tossed it to Dean, his trip-hammering heart and pinpoint vision and the saturated stench of vodka, pelting down the road laughing and passing the bottle back and forth, Dean thumping his back hard enough to wind, saying _you're a fucking natural, Adam, of course you are._

Sam comes back at three in the morning, after Dean has fallen face first on his bed and Adam has turned off the lights and bedded down unsleeping. He rustles through the bottles, empty and full, drinks water from the bathroom sink, flicks through the TV, some books, wastes time for at least half an hour before slumping restlessly on the couch, heels knocking together over the end.

When the car gets really hot sometimes a stale, metallic smell floats up around Adam, crushes the air from his lungs, unbearable, and lying there in the dark he starts to pant shallow and panicked like he does those times, puts his hand under his pillow and holds the piece of card there, runs his thumb over embossed dates. 

He stands on unsteady legs and walks outside, Sam's dark eyes pinned to his back until he closes the door on them, leans against the wall and tries to control his breathing, touches his mom's face to his cheek and tucks himself into a feeble one-armed hug. Every time it surprises him how much it hurts, how insupportable it is to pretend like this, like he could replace the one thing with the other. 

She's smiling in the photo. Whoever had organised the funeral had looked through their house and decided on that one, pulling it down from the dresser and opening up the back to take it out. John, Adam, and fish have been neatly excised, leaving her free to causelessly smile her way into oblivion. 

In the morning they go back to the store and Dean leans on the old guy until he spills, pulls the ring off his finger that he'd stolen from the gutshot would-be thief, and they leave him safe and sound and sobbing on the floor.

::

It only takes a few weeks to get used to having no fixed address and no destination, doubling back irrationally, surrendered to the apparently random direction of Sam's research. They drive through the mythical and ancient towns of the South, towns he's only ever read about, shocked to find that they exist in real terms, that they have a Kinko's and gum smeared into the pavement and kids throwing themselves down suburban playground slides.

In Mobile they hear of some bright young things meeting messy ends in Plano and they turn around and head back into Texas, where it turns out a chain of wannabes had sold their souls in college for a shot at the big time, one after the other, going down now like dominoes. The latest dead guy's widow, chilly in her perfect black and gold mourning garb, and unconcerned enough about her new status to hit on Dean right in front of them, tells them about her late husband's best friend, who'd risen up the ranks with the same kind of spectacular fortune.

They have to break in to his mansion. He refuses them entry, pulling a sideboard against the door with the strength of abject fear, crying out that he's called the police. 

“He hasn't,” Dean says to Adam, levering open the kitchen window. “They never do. Somewhere in there they know.”

He's right, of course. The guy ends up grateful that they're on the same page, trying to convince them how blameless he is, how harmless a wish it was to have this huge white house with its seven bedrooms and its infinity pool and its bar in the living room.

“I never thought it would actually happen,” he stammers, wild-eyed and checking the windows obsessively. “I mean, Jesus, it's been ten years.”

“Wait, you're hearing them now?” Sam demands. “It's ten years tonight?”

The guy can't answer, hands clapped over his ears, head shaking, sinking into his white-leather armchair, and Sam turns, barely noticing.

“Dean, you gotta get out of here.”

“Excuse me?”

“Dean--”

“I'll be _fine,_ ” says Dean, staring at the man, slight twist to his face of scorn or empathy Adam can't tell.

They bundle him into the Impala and drive out of town to the first dirt crossroads they can find. It's pouring and thunderous and they're soaked instantly, standing and putting the summoning spell together, and as they're doing it the guy starts screaming, clawing his way out of the car and rolling in the road, trying to get to his feet and slipping, shredding his hands in the dirt, mind gone in his panic.

Adam drops to his knees and starts to carve a hole in the gound and can't get it deep enough for the box, hard-packed gravel under a layer of slimy mud, and he freezes when he hears the Hellhounds over the man's cries and the pounding rain, on them so suddenly and hugely, turning his insides to water. 

He is yanked backwards, tossed six feet and off of the road by Sam, and lands heavily on his back, stunned and breathless. At the edge of his vision Sam is pulling at Dean too, pulling him away and down and making him small as paws thunder past them, rain bouncing off thin air, running the man down and tearing him apart. 

Dean cleans up, pulling a shovel out of the trunk and digging the man a shallow roadside grave. Sam walks down off the road into the grass, tall and nodding out here where no council mows, and folds himself down to the ground. 

Adam crouches next to him. Sam is looking at his hands, shaking in a fine tremble. The rain sinks further into them, running under his collar, matting Sam's hair to his forehead, curling it under his ears, but the night is far from cold.

“He shouldn't have to deal with that.” 

Adam looks up. Dean has marked out the boundaries of the grave and is working down from the top, but it's too dark to see his face.

“I think he's okay.”

Sam shakes his head. 

“If something happens to him again,” he says, voice low enough that they can both pretend it's the rain, and if he finishes the sentence Adam doesn't hear it.

::

He feels sometimes like his mother's hanging heavy within him, her picture moving from his wallet to under his pillow each night, every night watching Dean drink away the evening, Sam frowning at him. He's never been around someone who drinks as much as Dean, who at night always has a bottle or a flask in his hand. He can understand the desire, especially after the Hellhounds; would love to sink mindless and memoryless into the evening, but it doesn't work for him. When he drinks that much it gets better for moments, worse immediately, opening up his black fears and letting him dwell in them, and he dreams of his mother's face morphing, teeth and pink gums that come down on his skin. _I love you,_ she says. _Adam, don't leave me._

She never grew up in Windom, born and raised in Chicago, and he never asked her how she ended up in the podunk town where she died because of a man. He imagines next-year-that-will-never-be, him and Ru partying and studying, excited and self-absorbed and content with monthly homecomings, a hateful ungrateful son, his mom going to work each day, at night watching _NCIS_ in an empty house.

::

Every afternoon he has to practice. Adam is not a very good shot but he loves the guns anyway, loves their heavy sawn-off and the way his muscles strain as he raises it, but he can't keep it steady and his aim is for shit.

Sam also makes him practice with a knife and that works a lot better, fluid movement to compensate his lack of strength, and after a few weeks he can make it stick in tree trunks nine times out of ten with some accuracy. Outside of Augusta the stupid old car fails them and they're forced to stop while Dean fiddles around with it, and Adam and Sam spend all afternoon sparring, trip-trapping back and forth in the late-spring heat, fast and sharp, Sam down to his undershirt and sweating through it already. Adam wears his flannel like always, one sleeve pinned and the other rolled up, streaming sweat but he's finally getting to the point where he can feel his arm working like it should, like there's power in it.

Adam has the knife against Sam's nothing but he still hits the grass again and again, twists and blocks coming out of nowhere. It's the best workout he's had since the hospital, the most he's been touched since the hospital, big hands dirty rough and strong instead of latex sterile, apologetically gentle and he tries in vain to be that too, to be strong, to be clever, or fast or fierce, to feint or dart while Sam's brushing his hair out of his eyes and none of it helps. He puts out his bad arm to stop his fall one too many times and stays down, gasping away the sudden wrenching nausea for a few minutes, Sam crouched by ready to slip an arm around and help him stand.

They step carefully back up the embankment. Dean has finished fucking around under the hood and is sitting on the passenger seat, door open, beer out, troubled.

"I thought you were having fun," he says. 

“Yeah, this is a fucking blast,” Adam snaps, grits his teeth on the pain. Sam already has the shrinker off and is checking his stump for abrasions, but it's just tender, throbbing in time with his pulse, vulnerable and aborted and useless.

::

They get another job quickly and it's so bad, the grossest thing Adam's ever seen, worse than the Hellhounds, awful bloody shreds of a human person that press constantly behind his eyes and then there's another victim and it's worse. Sam thinks it might be a seal and spends hours in a library in Asheville poring through old newspapers and record books, while Adam and Dean canvass witnesses and hang around the morgue guessing which part was the hunter and which part was his dog. Back in the motel Sam hands Adam versions of Revelation until Adam starts thinking in gothic script, black-line etchings and jagged wood carvings overlaying widows and streetscapes and broken desperate fingernail tracks.

Every time Adam opens John's journal Dean suddenly gets antsy, like Adam will find out something true about him, but not even Sam's section has much to say about Dean or their dad, sticking to facts and footnotes, the colour of their days rarely bleeding through.

"Why don't we get these people on our side?" Adam asks. "They gotta know there's an apocalypse coming, right? Maybe they would know what we're dealing with."

"Who?" Dean says, and looks over his shoulder down at the neat methodical handwriting, dense around clippings and precise drawings. Adam shrugs.

"Any of them. This Gordon guy."

"Gordon's an a-hole," says Dean after a long pause and at the same time Sam says, "Gordon's dead," sitting on the bed expressionless, blue and red flicking over his face as he jumps through channels. Adam is surprised. Sam has not written this tidbit down.

"Gordon's a dead a-hole," Dean says. "We don't hook up with other hunters. It doesn't work."

Adam has no real picture of how many hunters there are out there, and they might all be assholes but Sam and Dean seem to have plenty of practise dealing with that personality type. Sam's face is drawn in hard unpleasant lines, the light of _SVU,_ and Dean shifts to sit next to him on the bed, squishing until Sam concedes some space.

Adam turns to Lucien's _Bestiary,_ too tired to read, paging through in search of something with the teeth or claws or opposable thumbs to make the kind of mess they've seen.

"When did you write in Dad's journal?" Dean mutters, quiet in the ads but not quiet enough.

Sam shrugs in the corner of Adam's eye.

"Until I stopped."

::

It's not a seal, to Sam's obvious frustration; it's a creature, some folkloric nightmare Dean calls a Tailypo. They kill it in the middle of a moonlit forest, its howls as Adam throws its tail onto the fire so shatteringly loud that he's scared it'll bring the trees down on them all in its fury, and move on like it's nothing, Sam trawling papers and news feeds in pursuit of the next thing, Dean driving and drinking and frowning uneasy.

Adam gets a lot less precious about putting things in his mouth, gets used to the dry feel of fabric between his teeth, bills between his lips; his arm gets less and less useless and then one night he makes four hundred dollars hustling some douchebags at darts in a backwoods bar in Ohio and they have to run before they get taken down, laughing drunk and wild at the shaking fists behind them, pickup trucks dwindling in the rear window.

"You kicked ass in there," Sam says, turns to the backseat, throws a high five that Adam returns in spades. Dean sticks his hand palm up over his shoulder too and Adam laughs and slaps it, dizzy in a highwayman romance.

They go for a late dinner in a bar in the next county, expansive spread of greasy buffalo wings and lukewarm nachos in coagulated cheese. They cram into a booth and drink and stuff themselves and Dean smiles a lot, makes a lot of terrible jokes and spends a lot of time staring over at Sam sprawled out easy and grinning wide.

"More beer?" says Sam.

"More beer," says Adam, thumps the table and slips out to turn his good mood on the chick behind the bar, one of the better ones he's seen, dimples, buzzcut and tight shirt. She gives him a long look as he comes up, takes her time drawing their glasses so Adam hops up on a stool.

"You just gonna let them sweat?" he says.

Her eyes flick from his face to his arm.

"Iraq," he says, and she goes uh- _huh._

"You don't believe me?"

"I don't believe anything anyone says in here."

He's failed a test he didn't even know he was taking and he tries to back off gracefully, takes two glasses back to the table cheeks burning red and doesn't notice the sullen silence until he returns with the third, catches Sam hissing,

"God Dean, it's what Dad would have--" and then his mouth snaps shut as Adam sits down, looks from one to the other, at their matching expressions of pissed-off stubbornness. Sam finishes his drink in a few gulps and declares he's going for a walk, turning his back already as he says so, and then it's just Adam and Dean sitting awkwardly next to each other at the table, which Adam supposes works for Dean because it's not like he ever looks at Adam anyway, attention always tuned to Sam and more so every day, as though just by being here Adam is making them precarious, Sam falling away on his own and Dean reaching out after him unbalanced.

::

Sam finds out somehow about a seal in the Rockies, some kind of Pioneer deal, and he takes them in deep, five days deep, bear mutilations and crashdown trees, cicadas thundering through the silence in a deeply watchful way just like every disastrous horror movie Adam has ever seen. Dean looks like he's two seconds from throwing them each over a shoulder and hightailing it out of there.

The fourth day the track disappears, to Adam's eye. They say John taught them how to do this, took them into forests and deserts and mountains, like he showed them everything else, how to shoot and fight and scam and live without women. He taught Adam how to fish one weekend on Lake Shetek like it was a pleasure, recreational; like he never expected Adam to need it. 

He starts to wonder whether or not they might be chasing clouds and then he's woken one morning by Dean's shoe thudding into his back, sits up groggy to see Dean throwing gear into his duffel. He's had a dream of the angel Castiel, was given an impossible date and time and address in Helena that for some reason he's taking seriously and Sam is similarly galvanised, forgets about the seal and pushes them for three hellish stumbling days back to the car, and then it's only fifty minutes to the warehouse, the way Dean drives, but still too late, hours too late and their voices float out emptily through the ruin of the building as they step round girders and rubble, protective sigils and traps and blood and absolutely no one else.

Sam grabs a length of iron and hurls it at the wall, a deafening crash that makes Adam flinch, kicks at plywood and brick as Dean barks out his name. He swings around and stabs a finger at Dean.

"Cas wouldn't have risked this if it wasn't important, Dean. What if we were finally going to catch a fucking break? Huh?"

"Then he'll find another way to tell us. Get your shit together."

Sam runs a hand through his hair, leaves it wild and searching, and pulls out his cell.

::

They head to a diner south of Butte and meet up with a chick called Ruby, a name vaguely familiar to Adam as one of Sam's better sources but she doesn't know what Castiel's deal is. She expands on a bunch of other stuff though; dire stuff about Lilith and the progress of the apocalypse and Sam sighs pissily and fills in the gaps like he's heard it all before.

She's pretty hot, Adam has to say, generous mouth and a killer dark-eyes dark-hair combo, and when she looks him in the eye and says she's pleased to meet him, he fidgets, self-conscious. The only girls he sees anymore snap their gum at him from behind gas station counters or eye him sceptically from behind bars, hide their crying behind their hair and hands, and he's so ugly now he almost thinks he can't talk to her at all. 

"How do you know all this?" he blurts, and she smiles at him. Her eyes flip beetle black and his heart stops and he leaps up aghast, bangs his thighs hard against the formica and barely feels it.

"What the _fuck,_ Sam!" 

Dean grabs his arm and pulls him down to his seat.

"Calm down," Sam says, impassive as a law, and as his heart starts back up Adam looks at Dean who is definitely not surprised, who sits there and talks the talk with dark twist to his mouth that a blind man could see though.

"What the _fuck,_ Dean," he says after Ruby and Sam have gone off God knows where.

“Her intel's been good so far.”

Adam gapes at him.

“What happened to _you can never trust a demon_?"

Dean looks down at the tacky menus, spins them on the tabletop, lip curled in distaste. 

“She saved his life. When I was gone."

They never bring this up, the months and years Dean spent down there, but Adam can tell it is a milestone, a fracture. It seems impossible, still, that it could have happened and that Dean could be here now, with his dumb jokes and his bravado and his strength that carried Adam up from underneath the ground; Adam would refuse to believe it if it didn't weigh so obviously on them both. He doesn't like to think of Dean dead. Or Sam, which was the proximate cause after all, when Dean had refused to be alone.

He understands the impulse. His mom's memorial card is simple, just her photo and the dates, the name of the funeral home, Smith and Sons. _Dearly missed by friends and family_ , it declares. The weight of this callous understatement, the way that it chokes him and drags at his heart, is unbearable sometimes. 

Dean huffs a breath.

“What do you want me to say, Adam? It's never neat, it never fits. You just,” he shrugs, swings out his arms with an unhappy, sarcastic grin, thumps his hands on the table and pushes himself to his feet. “You just make do.”

He heads over to the counter and leans on it, leans in with a confidential smile to talk to the girl behind, who is maybe only a year or two older than Adam, a skinny black girl who finishes yawning and takes one look at him and seems to lose her mind. By the time Sam gets back he's left with her.

Sam leans back in the booth and hooks an elbow over the back of the seat. 

“Where's Dean?” he asks, and frowns when Adam tells him, eyebrows pinched, and then seems to shake it off. He's shed his anger somewhere and is in an expansive mood now, bright-eyed and alive, tapping his fingers in a fast rhythm on the leather. Adam offers him a drink of his half-finished milkshake and he refuses with a chuckle.

He just had sex, Adam realises, horror dawning in his heart, ducking his head to his straw and hoping it doesn't show on his face; he just went off with Ruby somewhere and fucked her, and now he gets to be happy, and Dean too, both of them walking around so perfect and whole, women everywhere they go looking at them like they're more than a curiosity, like they're dreams come true, and that is who Sam spends it on: a monster, and probably a murderer.

::

On the outskirts of Mena, Arkansas, they squat in a derelict home, grey and slumped and old, with crumbling paint and tiny orange flowers on the overgrown porch so Adam has to tread on them to get in. There's a family of swallows tweeting in the rafters and faded pictures still on the walls, plenty of space to spread out but they bed down in the living room anyway, around the fireplace. Fires have become, since the hike, Adam's chore, but Sam can't help giving tips and it rubs Adam raw so he ditches them, goes on a second tour of the place and taking his time, practising a measured silent footfall, twisting quick and surprising through doorways, flashlight whipping over a sewing room with nursery pictures on the walls, a bedroom without a bed, a bathroom with handrails and broken, fallen tiles.

On his way back to the lounge he hears his name and pulls up sharp, Dean's voice hissing the words _not ready_ , and feels himself go cold.

"We don't have time to sit around and play with ourselves, Dean. Lilith is _winning,_ don't you get that?"

"Oh, I get that. You're so, you're so keen to go out and get yourself killed."

"Listen to me, Dean, for once. Look at me," Sam says, harsh and low and frustrated, and there are steps, determined, stuttering. "Look at me," Sam repeats, gentler, and Dean curses, high and breathless and stumbles through the doorway, right past Adam without even seeing him and Adam looks into the room in enough time to catch Sam rip open the front door and throw himself outside, door sticking in the swollen jamb, propped open and letting in the night.

::

In Jacksonville the eyes of the stuffed alligator above their motel room door follow them everywhere and Dean is bitching to Adam about how creepy it is when there's an unmanly yelp from the bathroom and Castiel walks out, Sam a step behind, scowling as Dean laughs.

Castiel looks like an accountant waiting for the homebound train, but he brushes off Dean's welcome with an uninflected murmur. He seems unimpressed by Adam's presence. He is here to tell them about the field of massacred calves that lies northwards, a presage of a legion of Hell and Lilith herself appearing, but the reason they're here at all is that there's a nursing home poltergeist two miles away who is due to make some old hearts fail in two and a half hours. Dean shakes his head and cuts his hand through the air. 

“Cas, hang on a second. What happened in Helena? Where were you, man?”

“I was called home and reminded of my purpose. I know my duty, Dean. Can you say the same?” Castiel says, and Dean covers up a look of vast betrayal with fury and tells him to go fuck himself.

Castiel stares at him for a long time, head cocked slightly.

“Dean--”

“We'll do what we're gonna do, Cas.”

Castiel frowns. None of his expressions seem to fit right, like a mask papered over something immense and unknowable. It's unsettling, and more so when he disappears, the shock of his presense becoming absence making Adam's heart stop momentarily.

“Dean,” says Sam, careful and slow. “Tell me we're gonna go.”

“Not you too,” Dean groans, and they square off and proceed to have an endless, shattering argument about which takes priority. They are like this all the time now, ever since Montana, and Adam has learned to keep his distance, old bad blood dripping through every word. 

“Get in the goddamned car Sam or so help me I will shoot you where you stand,” Dean says finally. Sam shoots Adam a dark, poisonous look and shifts ceaselessly the whole drive there, and five minutes later he falls behind as they race towards the entrance, shotgun forgotten, grabs the keys Dean throws at him and drives away, wheels spitting bitter gravel into the air. For long seconds Dean stares after the tail lights, chest heaving, hand clenching around the grip of his gun.

"Come on," he growls, as dangerous as Adam has ever heard him, and they burst unfortunately into the nursing home, chaos and shooting and vain attempts at interrogation, Adam nearly eviscerated trying to corral crazy scared old people like rusty cats before Dean finds and burns a letter with some treasured lock of hair in it.

Dean wordlessly hotwires a convenient sedan and they haul ass to a field five miles outside of Alma in time to catch the end of the show, Sam standing hard-shouldered and too tall by the Impala, disappearing into occasional silhouette as angels stalk the field in front of him, casting light. Castiel is closer and turns alone as Dean slams the car door like he's trying to crack the earth open. The air is heavy with ozone and sulphur and Adam breathes through his mouth, following Dean, dread in his gut.

"Lilith has escaped but some remain. Dean, careful," Castiel says, holds up a hand that Dean steps right past, almost up to Sam's back and then he jerks to a halt, throws up his hands in a full-body flinch and past him Adam can see something breaking through the lines, a scuttling that makes it even to the Impala; as it comes into the circles cast by the headlamps someone moans in wordless terror, and Castiel strikes it, blindingly bright; they all watch as it tumbles to a twitching, oozing rest at Dean's feet, oil-slick teeth and melting already.

"What is it?" Adam whispers, hoarse, gorge rising, and Castiel glances at Dean, and after a second so does Sam, lips thinning to a bloodless line. Dean kicks at it, and three of its legs rip off and crackle away; he turns and looks down into the car, grips the roof white-knuckled, swallows hard.

"Time for a drink,” he says.

Adam could not agree more.

::

The nearest bar to the motel in the next town over only a parking lot away but walking across it Adam has enough time to start to worry; worry about Dean, white as a sheet and practically floating; and Sam who, far from concerned or contrite, is nursing a seething fury that makes the hair on the back of Adam's neck stand up.

They set about obliterating themselves when they get there, shot chasing beer chasing shot; Dean starts to come back to himself, blink in his surroundings, but Sam is like rock, barely moving, staring at the bottles above the bar like he can make them explode. Adam tried to ask him on the drive over what had happened on that field, but got nothing. Everything that happens Adam can see there's more they're not telling him, always more to the shit they kill or their history or post-traumatic triggers or whatever, leaving Adam to negotiate their fucked up responses without compass or map.

So he gives up, irritation thrumming under his skin, grabs his beer and stands and they don't even notice. There's a girl thumbing through the jukebox, black hair, short denim and pink hoodie stopping above her bellybutton, clumped mascara and a cute smile, so he heads over near her, sets his beer down and jangles a bunch of change on the pinball glass, catches her eye as she looks up. She wanders over.

"Gimme a hand?" he says, and she grins, sets her beer next to his.

"Sure."

Her name is Tiffany, and he takes the left and she takes the right and they kick ass for a while, Gomez and Morticia lighting up in approval. When she laughs she throws her whole head back, and if it's something he's said she'll elbow him and he'll get a whiff of cheap deodorant and sweat, curves of her belly and breasts so close it makes him dizzy.

They get another free ball and something changes behind them, buzz of the bar dimming and Adam turns to see Sam hauling on Dean's arm, pulling him out the door, each stonefaced and flushed.

"Douchebags," Tiffany says, years of experience in her tone, and he feels his own face redden.

“You want another beer?” 

“Read my mind,” she says, toasting him with her empty, and grins at him.

“What was that about?” He asks the bartender, pointing at the door.

“Fags,” she says, with a _who knows_ shrug, wedging the tops off his bottles, and he's vaguely ashamed that he doesn't defend them to this woman, with her nicotine fingers and photo of herself and her kid on the shelf behind, whose lives Sam and Dean are trying to save.

He heads back to Tiffany, distracted and guilty, and gradually forgets it as they play a few more games and drink a few more beers, jostling, bumping and high-fiving when they get Cousin It.

"That was fun," Adam says.

"It was," she says, with a genuine smile, eyes crinkling at the sides. Adam opens his mouth, and she goes, "Look, I gotta get home, but I'll see you around, yeah?" and claps him on his good shoulder and disappears and Adam is left standing there with his dick hanging in the wind, just another loser next to the pinball machine.

He gets out of there quick, humiliation burning, and heads back to the motel. Dean's in bed and has his eyes shut and his back to the door. Adam brushes his teeth and changes and drinks metallic water from the faucet and lies down on the next bed next to him, each pretending they're the only person in the room, a wretched lonely farce that threatens to drag Adam away, beer-spinning nausea and self-pity until Sam comes in on a heavy weary drunkstep that hesitates by Dean's bed and Dean goes so still the sheets rustle.

::

At breakfast they both have hours of missed sleep under their eyes and Adam supposes he isn't much better, all three of them sullen and irritable. Adam's never seen Dean so hungover and it lasts all day, heavy and dazed sagging through his whole body, and his hands shake every time he takes them off the wheel. Adam buys him a bottle of water when they stop for gas and he croaks his thanks like he can't remember how to speak.

They're driving for the sake of driving, it seems, taking the highway north and ending up somewhere in Tennessee. Sam fidgets his way well into the sunset, aborted paces brushing by Adam's elbow every thirty seconds as he's trying to clean his knives, trying to keep them steady on the table with his stump so he can get into the teeth and grooves with his brushes, so repetitively, infinitely annoying that Adam is about to tell him to get the fuck out when he says himself,

"I'm going for a walk, I'll be back," and Dean says, "No," quiet and firm, and doesn't even look away from the TV.

Sam stops, agape, stands and breathes for a minute before running a hand through his hair. 

"You need a hand?" he asks Adam, and Adam puts the brush down and stares at him until he drops his eyes and goes to sit next to Dean on the bed, swigging in turns from Dean's flask, matching points of colour high on their cheeks.

::

Dean has a nightmare that night and they continue, three or four a week. Adam has nightmares about that thing in Alma himself, so he gets it, gets used to sitting up groggy just after they've all gone to sleep as Dean thrashes and moans and Sam crouches by his head, combing a hand though his hair, whispering nonsense. Every time when Dean wakes up the first thing he does is push Sam away so he rocks back on his heels.

The next time Sam says he's going for a walk Dean says no again, and Sam goes anyway. Adam is embarrassed for him, and Dean doesn't try it another time, as the days stretch on, every morning finding Sam increasingly frowning and black-eyed, skin stretched across his cheekbones. He checks his phone restlessly, as they're driving, as they're eating and reading and hunting, every glance and aborted sigh like cockroaches under Adam's skin. It's Ruby, he realises in retrospect, as Sam's temper shortens, leaving him tense and pale and snapping at Adam for winding down the window too loud.

One night Sam is supposed to be fetching them Cokes but they both know he's out there with her. 

“Think they're fucking in the car?” Adam says, sour taste in his mouth.

Dean tells him to shut up and half a second later checks through the curtains. Outside they are having an argument, Sam throwing his hands up, leaning over her, and she's so tiny but she couldn't give a shit, Adam can tell, steel in the set of her shoulders.

Whatever. Adam can't be bothered caring and he sits down with John's journal, flipping through to the _Rituale._ Dean's hand fists in the curtain, rod creaking, dead moths resurrected for moments as they twirl to the ground. 

_Cessa decipere,_ and Adam should just get out of here. These guys and their fucking issues, he will never get to the bottom of it. He should just walk one night when they're too busy pretending they're not freaking out about each other to care what the hell he's doing. He should take their money and go and find himself a car, ride the streets and sleep on benches and pick up girls and fuck up some evil things until he's too fucked to go on and then take himself out. It's not like anyone would miss him.

Half an hour later Sam blows in alone, and Dean, in a chair by the window, arms folded, spits something sarcastic.

“Ruby says,” Sam starts, and Dean's face closes over and he grabs his whiskey and heads into the bathroom.

When the lock clicks Sam turns his attention to Adam and Adam just shrugs, turns a page. Sam makes a wordless sound of frustration and pulls up a chair next to him, grabs his wrist. He's sweaty, hair hanging lank across his forehead, but Adam tests his grip instinctively and it's like iron.

“You see, though, right, Adam,” he says. “We finish this, and things can go back to normal.”

“That's not going to happen,” Adam says, unease flowering at the depth of Sam's delusion here, Sam who is supposed to be so clear-eyed. “Sam. You're playing their game, don't you see that?” 

Sam shakes his head.

“Adam, I've been doing this a long time. Do you agree that Lilith has to be stopped?”

Adam sighs.

“Yes.”

“I'm telling you, there's only ever one game, and they set the board. You just have to figure out how to break the rules. Right now, that's Ruby. And he's not – he's not strong enough. It's my turn now."

“You should stop fucking with him, then,” Adam says, bewildered, and Sam's grip tightens before he drops Adam like he's trash, face unreadable. He moves away to lie on the couch, forearm over his eyes, and it's like that for another hour until Dean emerges, arrows towards his bag and fishes out his flask, heads back to the bathroom. Sam is in his way.

"Dean," he says, calm and low, hands up placating, "please listen to me," and Dean gets a wild terrified look in his eye and turns on a dime, heads straight out the door.

"God _damn_ ," Sam curses, thumps the wall with the side of his clenched fist, stalks to the window to track him for a minute then grabs his lockpick kit and leaves, and Adam is stupidly, absurdly alone for the rest of the night, phone silent, no idea if they're making up or sleeping rough or bleeding out on the highway, only company the car sitting solid and reassuring out the front. There's no way Dean would go without the car; Adam thinks he can be sure of that.

::

They come back soon after dawn, and Adam pretends their guilty slinking doesn't wake him, makes them whisper and tiptoe around the room, refuses to sit up until Sam comes back with conciliatory coffee and doughnuts. Adam takes a bite and looks at them, leaning on opposite walls. They've been fighting maybe all night, tiredness stooping their shoulders, a bruise under Sam's eye and a red swollen mouth on Dean, but even though they're talking nicer, some of Sam's sharp edges filed away overnight, Adam thinks it didn't go Dean's way, a hint of victory about Sam, something shamed in Dean's slouch.

"Let's hit the road," Sam says, sucking down his coffee, and Dean rubs at his face and pushes himself to his feet with a sigh.

::

Three days later Sam brings Ruby into the motel, lit from within, practically trembling: Lilith is in Maryland harvesting baby blood and it's crunch time. Dean crosses his arms and shakes his head like he doesn't even realise he's doing it, flat denial in his eyes.

"If you want to stay out of it, I understand," says Sam, like he's inviting it.

"Shut up."

"Dean, we _had_ this discussion."

"That wasn't a _discussion_ ," Dean snaps, and flushes. "We should to wait for Cas. And Adam's not – they raised me for a reason. We still don't know what they want me to do."

“Dean,” Adam says, stands in front of him until Dean has to look at him, keeps his face open and gentle. “Ruby's been right so far. And Lilith is trying to raise the Devil. What else are we gonna do?”

It is a hard fight, pushing across the grounds of the convent, beyond what Adam had tried to imagine, nameless and faceless bodies with beetle-black eyes that are too numerous, too quick; Adam empties two guns immediately and is left with Ruby's knife, no reload necessary, their blood hot and slick down his arm and spotting his face and tongue as he chants, exorcisms that dwindle into breathless fragments. Together Adam and Dean keep a steady pace, Ruby going down behind them, Sam ahead of them the whole way, pressing Lilith back down the hall, disappearing and reappearing amongst her posse, the black boil of exorcism constant and sulphurous in their noses, hosts strewn behind him like matchsticks. 

Sam is working some kind of spell up ahead, powerful and getting more so, forcing Lilith backwards into a small chapel barely wincing with the effort, holding her still as Adam rushes to paint the trap round her. He wasn't expecting her to be in a child's body, blonde and sweet except for the blood matted in her hair, down the front of her dress. She is outwardly calm and smirking but her eyes roll to watch him shake the spray can, and there is animal panic in there.

"Are you sure you're strong enough, Sammy? Get enough demon blood with your Wheaties this morning?" she says, high but not girlish, not a little girl's voice; it's a controlled growl. 

"Yeah," says Sam, and twitches his fingers, and she convulses, ribs backlit through her dress. Adam follows Dean's appalled eyes to the red smear of Sam's chin, the dark gleam on his jacket. Sam bends his head minutely towards them; his hair falls forward to cover his eyes and Lilith stills, props herself on her knuckles, gasping at the floor and then up at them.

"And what's this? Fresh Winchester. Each one prettier than the last.”

Adam scowls. "Fuck off."

"Ignore her," says Dean, voice rough, and her head tilts, pitying.

"Oh, Dean, let's not pretend."

"You don't get to speak to him.” Sam fists his hand and she rocks forward a little, mouth working soundlessly, little-girl teeth bared, lips curled back past pink gums, all cornered rat.

"Go," Sam says to them, tossed over his shoulder. Dean's face is torn with dismay.

" _Sam._ "

"Get _out_ ," he snarls, and Dean turns to Adam, grabs his sleeve and starts pulling.

"The trap," Adam stutters, can dropping from his hand, follows before he sees anything he can't unsee, turns and stumbles out as a howl rips through the air.

There is no one left to kill and they make it fifty feet down the corridor before someone appears. It is Ruby. She runs towards them, past them, gore on her hands, hope on her face that makes Adam's stomach curdle when she throws open the door and is silhouetted by a blinding light, as bright and beautiful as Castiel in Alma but different, older. Dean screams in Adam's ear to run and pushes him hard in the back and Adam does, God help him he does run and leaves Dean to turn back to Sam inevitable as the sun, as the building starts to groan and dust sifts gently down.

He makes it outside, makes it to the trees and tumbles to his knees, choking in thick air, a smell like ozone that creeps right to where he's most terrified, wipes away tears and stands again, waiting endless minutes on damp grass, the light still shrieking out the windows, up to the sky where the knave has fallen in, pummelling even through the mortar; whatever's coming is going to take the place apart, and if Sam and Dean don't come out he will be nothing again, no one, he will be alone again in the world.

Sam and Dean come.

They come at a stumbling run, straight towards Adam, arm in arm, chasing their shadows until the light winks out as sudden as it was bright, and he goes to meet them almost blind, violet afterimage overlaying the world. Dean puts a hand on Adam's shoulder and they turn wordlessly towards the rubble, roar echoing in their ears, and above them the stars slowly wink back into existence.

 

**Part 3. Always something rotten.**

Adam kind of expected Dean to fall to pieces but he's just the same; maybe drinks a bit more, but he says the same stupid jokes and makes the same stupid faces, listens to the same stupid music. They move around a fair bit, take some jobs, do their best to avoid Zachariah and his buddies. 

Every couple of days their phones will chirp with numbers and Dean will take a bottle and a stack of newspapers and sit down at the laptop, corresponding a disappearance or death or sighting, jumping up and down the west coast.

They're hanging around the middle of the country, long straight lines though fields and deserts, chasing monsters through unglamorous weather-beaten towns and family trouble always, always something rotten at the centre of these tired hopeless families, and Sam is a thousand miles away with the Pacific between his toes.

::

After the light fades, convent crumbling behind them, they walk stiff and broken down a faint track to a barn; inside is the Impala, black and gleaming, ready to take them away.

Dean puts them in their seats and starts driving and that's it: no talking allowed and all Adam has are these two familiar silhouettes trying not to look at each other, Sam stunned quiet, set of Dean's shoulders broad and furious. He drives like he can't trust himself to do anything else.

Adam's hand is crusty with blood, dried blood mostly, some darker congealing steaks and globs. His shirt sleeve is dark and heavy with it, too, and he can feel it on the skin underneath. It had been unavoidable in a knife fight, arteries opening under his hand, demon blood flowing the same as regular blood, smelling the same; it stains his cuticles and the creases of his palm the same. 

Here he is again, ruining Dean's car.

But up in front Sam is not looking at his hands with surprise and Dean seems to be taking it like an expected blow. At a T-junction they stop for a second and Dean takes Sam's chin, turns it to take a closer look in the yellow streetlight.

"Dean," Sam says, pleading note, but Dean drops him and guns around the turn.

"Not a goddamn word," he says, and they stay that way the whole brutal fifteen-hour drive that stops only once, and briefly, for a roadside piss just before dawn, as Dean calls Bobby, and Sam starts to break out in an uneasy sallow sweat, and Adam changes his shirt and uses the last of their water to get the worst of it off his face and hands.

::

Bobby opens the screen door wordlessly. His house is brown and dusty, book-ridden, and Adam keeps on moving through until he finds a bathroom. He grimaces at himself in the mirror, smears of blood crusted along his hairline and into his hair, a glimpse of what it must have looked like before they sewed his cheek up. He wets his undershirt and wipes at it, around his face, up his arm, stained water puddling around the basin, and when he works himself into a spare, pink blooms irregularly on the fabric where he didn't dry off properly.

When he emerges, a fresh flannel shirt covering his sins, they are all gone but the car is dark and silent outside so he steps through the house until he hears their voices floating up through an open door, a warm cast of light that leads him below. 

Down in the basement Dean and Bobby stand in front of a solid metal door like something out of a cold war bunker, Dean's hand pressed to it. There is a small window at eye height for observation. 

Adam feels sick. 

He stands at the back of them and watches Dean's fist clench like clockwork on the door, open and shut, until a faint groan leaks from inside and he shoulders Bobby aside, slips through the door, click of a latch behind him.

Adam moves up to take his place. On the other side of the gummy window is a round room, shadows flipping lazily as a fan turns in the ceiling. Sam is sitting underneath it on a bolted-down iron-frame bed, ropes at his wrists leading to the headboard, mouth moving in silent muttering, pulling unevenly against his restraints. Dean leans over him, pushing down on his shoulder.

"Hey kid. I'm Bobby," says Bobby next to him and reaches to shake his hand, like he gets to start over or something because he remembered to put his left hand out. “Look, last time, that's on me. I shoulda handled it better."

Adam shakes his hand, strong, weathered, calloused, and drops it quickly. Inside the room it looks like Sam is crying.

"Coffee?" Bobby asks, and Adam turns and heads upstairs.

::

Looking back he should have guessed right from the start, from those early disappearances, the later hollow-cheeked snappishness. He remembers the legendary flameout of a meth head pre-med from freshman year who'd had that same furtive eye and restless preoccupation. He tries to trace it back with certitude, to pinpoint a moment in their travels when Sam had shown his colours, and has a nagging suspicion that he wouldn't be able to, that it stretches back further than him, out past the hospital, Sam off drinking Ruby's blood while he was double-dating and sleeping through his lectures, blind and ignorant.

“It ain't your fault,” Bobby says, pouring a slug of something into his mug. “Those boys make their own dumb decisions.”

How dumb do you have to be to be fooled by a dumb junkie? Adam thinks, and Bobby seems to sense it. He's like Dean, like all those years dealing with someone younger have suddenly been forgotten when faced with a not-Sam, play-acting because Adam is too wrong, too far out from what he could reasonably have expected to deal with.

“How are you going with that?" He indicates Adam's missing arm.

"Peachy."

"You're a talkative one, aren't you?"

Adam looks at him deadpan, and he chuckles brief and off-cut, the sound falling dead to the floor, through the cracks down towards Sam and Dean. Bobby's eyes are deep-set and bracketed with wrinkles, from smiling or pain who knows, but something in there runs deeper than the gruff-but-kindly-Sheriff thing he's trying on. 

"You know, I got a good training set up here. You can stay and use it. Hell, you do the dishes and I won't even make you pay."

Adam is flabbergasted. He can picture the car driving off without him but the idea of choosing it makes his skin run cold, his chest heave. The mug rattles when he sets it on the table.

"They're all I got left," he says, and Bobby looks grim like he didn't know the Winchesters at all, like he wasn't some old fucking buddy of John, like he didn't know how this family worked. 

"The offer's open," is all he says and then Dean comes in. Bobby hands him the third mug, cold by now. Dean's skin is grey but he's clean, must have cleaned up somewhere downstairs. He drove the whole way here, and his voice is cracked and dry.

"How long you think?"

"4 minutes and 33 seconds. I don't know, idiot. Do I look like I've done this before?”

"We're going," Dean says, drains the mug. As he lifts his chin Adam sees a smear of blood on his neck, a clear thumbprint under his eye.

"When will you be back?"

"Tomorrow," Dean says, looking at no-one, and Bobby makes some ham sandwiches in the late afternoon sun, and Adam gets in the passenger seat and they drive away.

::

They stop at a rundown house belonging to the prophet, a small nervous guy by the name of Chuck, who gives Dean the side-eye and looks at Adam like he recognises him. It's creepy, turning into full-on scary when Chuck has some kind of seizure and warns them that the angels are coming, fear breaking on his voice. Dean sighs like he's got no more breath left in his body and goes to get a kitchen knife.

Zachariah is as big a dick as Sam and Dean had said, appearing in his business suit, flanked by two angels. One of them is familiar.

“Not happy to see your old friends, Dean?” Zachariah says, fat-cheeked and smug. Castiel is impassive and Dean ignores him, glaring at Zachariah.

“Do you have any idea how badly you guys dropped the ball on this one?” 

Zachariah makes a face, mystified.

“Why would we help when you were doing so well by yourselves?”

“But we failed,” Adam says, and Zachariah shrugs.

“Not from where we're standing.” 

“No,” whispers Dean, seeing something Adam can't, almost struck down by it.

“Why, Sam Winchester broke the final seal,” Zachariah says, grinning at Adam. “Your brother raised the Devil.”

“I'm done with this,” Dean says and slams his bleeding hand against the angel sigil hidden behind the door. The angels disappear in a flash of light, the echoes of Zachariah's peeved _oh, for Pete's sake_ lingering in the air.

Floating to the floor in their absence is the top half of a matchbook, Castle Storage, and in stark capitals on the reverse: _HOLD FAST_. Adam picks it up feeling a searing burn of gratitude towards Castiel, and as he turns he catches sight of Dean, sunk into a chair, poleaxed. Adam grabs a bandage from their duffel and wraps his palm, bending close to hold the end of the bandage in his teeth. The blood is barely flowing by now, and when Adam is done Dean seems to wake up, folds his fingers experimentally and brings his hands up to rub at his face.

“Did you know?” Adam asks Chuck, and he shakes his head, frowning at them.

“They must have kept it close to their chest. You guys wanna stay here for a bit?”

“We should keep moving,” Adam says, as Chuck hides his relief poorly, and pulls Dean to his feet.

::

At Castle Storage is a cobwebby iron shed rented out to John Winchester, full of the mundane and the fantastic, more guns and knives than Adam can count, Greek Legendariums and earwiggy sweaters. Adam roots around in cardboard boxes chasing a scent he wouldn't recognise while Dean looks over the shelves, picks up an old soccer trophy, discards it to examine a suitcase. In a shoebox Adam finds three decks of playing cards, four decks of Tarot (one bloodstained) and a butterfly knife that flips open sweetly. He pockets it.

Back in 2005 he'd given John a belated Christmas present, bought last-minute after hearing he was on his way to town. He had stood under the bright lights of Target, staring at a wall of guy things: surely his dad had a rotary sander if he needed one; surely he didn't need an apron that commanded he be kissed and God knew what kind of special oil he needed for the truck he was driving those days. Under pressure he'd chosen a new Dean Koontz, that John had received with a wide smile. He'd read the blurb and tapped the hard cover like he couldn't want to dig in, and taken off the next day never to be seen again. 

He is staring at a milk crate of old books when Zachariah arrives again, Castiel replaced this time by another deadpan suit.

“Where's Cas?” Dean asks, and Zachariah frowns.

“Castiel just cannot seem to overcome his bad habits. He thinks he's helping you. You know what would actually be helpful?”

“Say what you've come to say,” Adam says when Dean, jaw clenched, refuses to answer.

“You numbskulls got us into this situation. It's time to play ball. Dean. Just say you'll join us.”

“You want me to kill the Devil,” Dean says, voice flat with disbelief.

“You?” Zachariah laughs, head thrown back. “You simpering wad of insecurity and self-loathing? You're just a human, Dean, sullied and impure. _Michael_ is our saviour. And _you_ are his vessel.”

“You need his consent,” Adam guesses, and Dean sneers.

“Yeah? Well, my answer is bite me.”

Zachariah stands straighter, and the room seems to darken.

“I am through dicking around here, Dean. The war has begun. Lucifer is risen, and we don't have our general. That's bad. Now, Michael is going to take his vessel and lead the final charge against the adversary.”

“And what's going to happen to the rest of us?” Adam asks, and Zachariah looks at him and Adam finds himself on the floor, blood pouring in heartbeat jets from a mirrored stump, his left arm disappeared. He screams in horror and writhes backward like a fish, eyes disbelieving.

“Do we understand each other?” he hears Zachariah saying on the edge of his hearing, but he is bleeding, armless, and his gorge rises and he throws up his empty stomach, bile and snot mixing with the mess on the concrete and he suddenly finds himself restored, Castiel's steady hand on his knee in a warehouse who knows where.

::

He's too weak to stand, hand and knees shaking, his thighs trembling like they've been over-strained; these things come to him detachedly, as does watching Castiel walk across to Dean, watching them say words, standing still and heavy and set against each other. Sam and Dean were right, he thinks, light-headed. Angels can do anything. They will do anything, and never out of love.

He looks down at his hand again. It's white, like the whole of him must be, drained of blood and feeling. His face, when he touches it, is whole, his scar the same, not open or fresh, alone and unmirrored and on the same side of his face. The rest of his body is the same; unchanged and unrestored.

His stump throbs, cramping his flexors and curling his hand up painfully, and he gasps, deep and shocked, waking to the pain and Dean's voice, raised in a growl.

“If I ever find out you knew about raising Lucifer, Cas, so help me, we will be _done_.”

“You have my word, Dean. They did not trust me,” Castiel says, and purses his lips, considering. “With reason.” 

“You're fixed?” Adam says, and they look over to him. Castiel nods, and walks over, gesturing to Dean to follow him. He puts a hand on each of their shoulders and blinks and nearly wipes Adam out with the pain, Dean doubling over next to him.

“What the fuck,” Dean gasps, like a concrete block's been dropped on his chest, which is how Adam feels. 

“I have carved protective sigils into your ribs,” Castiel says. “They should allow you to remain hidden.”

“Castiel,” Adam says, and holds up his arm. “For Christ's sake.”

Castiel crouches in front of Adam. He always looks so sad, his eyes turning down at the sides.

“I'm sorry, Adam. It's too late. This is who you are now.” 

“No,” says Adam, but Castiel doesn't hear him, standing already and turning to Dean, something about heading over to Bobby and Sam before Heaven cuts him off again. _No_ , Adam says again, pulling it down inside, hearing the denial in it. He'd known it before, and let hope get the better of him, and it hurts.

Castiel drops them back at the car, and they open the doors and drive away without a sign of Zachariah or his friends, and move on. All they ever do is move on, rolling from highway to motel to highway. Adam sees the same exhausted, shattered look on Dean's face, day-to-day, the same bewildered despair. After a while, he thinks, you expect to get used to the way time pushes you on, unconcerned with your will or desire or how crippled you are by the people you've lost, but it still feels like a miracle, or a dirty trick, that they can wake each morning, alone together, and repeat themselves mechanically and drive on, even as they start getting texts from Sam, detoxed and out west somewhere, and the days resettle themselves into a conceivable timeline.

::

Bobby calls them in to back up a hunter called Rufus on a job in Colorado and they pick him up on the way over.

"Don't think you're off the hook, boy," he says to Dean when he opens the door, and Dean shrugs. Bobby nods to Adam. "Good to see you, son.” 

“You too,” says Adam, tongue-tied; it's been a long time since he was someone people are happy to see. There's no sign of Sam, but of course he must have left weeks ago. His latest coordinates had pointed to a vamp nest down in La Jolla.

In Colorado the three of them walk down over-quiet streets, sprinklers hitting oversaturated lawns, midday sun bleaching houses and stores, only spot of colour a bright red car that Dean and Bobby whistle over. The last time Adam heard this kind of un-noise was in the Rockies, like it's been falling south, waiting for him, watchful silence crawling up his spine, ringing in his ears; the fighting and gore he can cope with but this suspense wears him so thin and when Dean stops and spins, Adam follows and almost shoots the woman behind them.

She has a shotgun and looks like she knows how to use it, keeps them at bay to throw water in their faces before she relaxes minutely.

“How'd you know to come?”

“Rufus got through. Didn't know you were here too,” says Bobby.

“Got here before dawn. You must be Adam. I'm Ellen," she says, and sticks out her left hand. Word must be getting around. Her voice is as clear and firm as her eyes and she bosses them around, Dean and Bobby doing what she says even though Adam is pretty sure they've both got way more experience than her. She takes them to where she has the townspeople holed up, underground, behind a salt line and a Devil's trap; a bunch of regular folk, a pregnant girl, a goddamn priest, who all clamour when they come through the door: _what's happening? Did you see my husband? Are you the police?_ Bobby quiets them down; they look so relieved when he speaks to them like the local mayor, like their father. 

Ellen pulls Dean and Adam aside.

“Firstly,” she says, and punches Dean in the shoulder with her rifle stock. He oomphs with pain; it was a solid hit.

“What, you can't pick up a phone? What are you, allergic to giving me peace of mind? I gotta find out you're alive, you've got a new _brother,_ from Bobby now?”

“Sorry, Ellen,” Dean says, sheepish.

“Yeah, you better be. You kids better put me on speed dial.”

“What's happened?” Adam says, hating the way she looks back and forth beween them, assessingly and expectantly, like she is owed their obligation.

It turns out the town is riddled with demons; Rufus and Ellen's daughter are possessed, which reduces their options and puts them all on edge. Bobby seems astounded that something got the drop on Rufus, and Ellen is wound up tight under her veneer of competence, fear tamped down hard.

“You said she wasn't ready to hunt,” Dean says, and Ellen twists her mouth.

“She's not, but if she's going to anyway you can bet I'll be watching her ass.”

Judging by the way Ellen is looking at Adam, he probably comes way behind this girl on the stages of readiness scale, and it's no surprise when the three of them decide to head out without him and try to reconnoiter, if not finish it. 

“Keep an eye on them, keep them calm,” Dean says on the way out, thumping the sawn-off into Adam's chest. Adam takes it and turns, nodding at Dean, who spares him a brief and sparse smile, faces of the civilians following their movements like sunflowers.

“Where are they going?” The pregnant girl asks.

“They'll be back,” Adam says, starting to sweat under the spotlight. The shotgun is heavy and he flips it to an easier hold, fumbling slightly. 

“Don't worry, we're safe in here,” says a guy with a military haircut, racking his rifle with a dramatic metal clack, and the faces very quickly shine towards him and Adam is able to melt backwards and away.

He pokes around the basement, a couple of rooms leading off from the cellar. He puts some books aside to take with them if they get the chance, a couple of old, odd Bibles and something in Greek full of terrifying woodcuts. In one room is a small walk-in closet, vestments hanging, mothball smell, mirror. His scar is fading, not the angry red line of even a month ago. One day it will just be a puckered white line. One day he will be old enough for it to seem like a mark of authority. 

"Everyone's always smaller in real life. Such a disappointment."

Adam whips around, flushing. It's the old guy in the suit, silver hair, the guy that looks like a news anchor. He looks Adam up and down, same scepticism as in the other room. 

"You don't look all that special," he says, and Adam breathes deep, startled into anger, bites his lip.

"What do you want?"

"Well, Sam, I want you," he says, which is a bit of a red flag, and Adam feels his whole body clench.

"What do you want with Sam Winchester?"

The man raises his eyebrow and looks more closely, then rolls his eyes, smirking.

"You're not him. Well then hell, son, what's the point of you?" 

He steps closer. There is something wrong and bad, deep in his eyes, Adam can tell that much. He holds up the shotgun.

" _Exorcizamus te,_ ” he begins, and the guy throws his head back and laughs. 

“I'm not a demon, you moron,” he says, and holds up his hand and twists his wedding ring and falls to the ground; yells loud, shockingly loud in the tiny space. Hand to his head, he looks at Adam like Adam is something to be feared, backs out of the closet doorway crablike on his hands as some of the others rush in.

The second the army guy looks at him Adam knows; he is already sliding the door shut when the girl screams and the rifle comes up. He hits the floor and backs up, braces the door with his leg and a small hole explodes in its centre, raining down chipboard dust, the shot too loud down here, and he's maybe going to die, these assholes are going to shoot him to death in a fucking closet with a ludicrous tissue paper door in this one horse town. It's not how he would have chosen.

“Put it away, son.”

Adam never thought he'd be so grateful to hear Bobby's voice, flat and deadly serious.

"He's possessed," the girl cries.

"There are no demons, it's a trick. Hey guy, keep your fucking hands where I can see them.” The door shudders under Dean's fist. “Adam, you ok?"

“Yeah,” Adam says, and it comes out high and reedy, throat strangled, heart pounding. He slides the door open and it's everyone in there, staring at him; he's got no idea if he's got black eyes or not, if they're just realising how useless he is.

"Where's the suit?" asks Ellen, and Adam tells them, and when they catch him out by his car he laughs at them, so sure he is of his place in the world, the cost of the fight ahead, death reaching calamitous across the land. They take his ring, but it still feels like he won.

::

Jo is older than him by a few years, cheerleader-pretty, thin and strong with chipmunky teeth and long blonde hair; he has gone out with a couple of her twins over the years, but they didn't have this hard look, and the speculation in her eyes as she looks at his scar and arm has nothing to do with attraction.

"Hey Adam," Ellen says as they make their goodbyes, drawing him to the side and pressing a piece of paper into his hand. "Don't be a stranger."

Adam shoves it in his pocket and shrugs.

"Promise," she says, setting off a resentful spark in his belly; she doesn't know him, and he sure as hell doesn't know her; she's not his mother, and she's not Dean's mother, and he's not going to spy on Dean for her. They can take care of themselves.

She calls his name again, as he heads back to the car but he doesn't look back. He's glad they're leaving, glad they'll be dropping off Bobby tonight and heading off alone. It's handy to have back-up but other hunters are an imposition, too watchful, too assuming, too ready to pick at raw nerves; it's better to limit your exposure. In the end it's only family that's left anyway.

::

All the time this will happen, Adam gets so sick of it: they'll pass a billboard or an old dude towing a shopping cart or a dusty turnoff and Dean will start a sentence, _hey remember_ and shift in his seat and stop. Adam doesn't even bother turning his head any more when Dean talks because it's not like he actually enjoys being the wrong person, he doesn't get his jollies kicking Dean in the face, which is what he looks like every time, like the gap between expectation and reality is huge enough to be physically painful.

::

They travel north-south-east in varying triangles that sometimes feel like escape and sometimes like a chase. He exorcises demons in Jefferson City, almost gets taken out by some witches in St Louis, finds a kid in Nebraska that makes thoughts real in a wash of blood and death, walks around him terrified of wishes hiding in his own heart and how far wrong they could go if the kid heard: his dead arm, sutured back on; his mom alive, but as she was just before her death. Castiel refusing him was the last death of that hope, and it's for the best. He's had plenty of evidence, travelling these roads, of the treachery of desire.

Dean forces him to get a checkup on his stump in Richmond, five hours waiting in Emergency claiming nonexistent pain. The doctor is impressed with the surgical scar and the shape of the muscle in his stump but orders scans anyway, and Dean flirts his way into fixing Adam up with a chest X-ray as well. The radiologist confirms that Adam has no broken ribs, but he can't explain the symbols overlaying his bones, frowning and twitching at his computer like it's just spat in his face.

Adam holds the X-ray in his one hand and stares at the lettering, stark and white overlaying the bones he was born with, over his lungs, his heart, at the core of him, new-bred and unrecogniseable. It's the same under Dean's skin, and Sam's, wherever he is, the three of them walking around, all of them motherless, and their father shared, and their blood, and now, their bones, surely the furthest it can go.

::

Adam sits in the front seat now and Dean lets him take point, sending him in first to speak to morgue attendants and police sergeants and tear-stricken girlfriends, husbands in a state of extended shock, all these people trying to convince themselves that they didn't see what they saw, that they can recover.

He slips occasionally into guidance, into the same patient teaching mode that Sam had in the hospital and afterwards, and Adam can't help but receive it awkwardly, stiff and ready for the moment when Dean backs off. _You don't need me to tell you that,_ Dean says. He doesn't need another brother, is the message, but there is a stubbornness in him that softens and rounds under pressure and turns back to steel when Adam is standing by, watching him bow down to pick up a little kid, shaken and terrified, patting her back as she hides her face in his shoulder. 

Adam has the odd echoing thought that it's lucky he is here during this extended redaction from his brother. Dean has hunted alone in the past, he knows, but he can't envision it, not Dean, who misses his liar of a brother so hollowly, who makes Adam coffee and saves Adam from witches and shows him the best back roads, who drives his father's car and listens to his father's music; not Dean, who seems never to have belonged to himself, and might be anything at all, bend any way at all, without someone around to stand by.

::

They get a call from Bobby. Sam, it seems, has somehow regained the Colt from a demon named Crowley; and, more than that, found a location for Lucifer.

“You let him do that by himself?” Dean demands down the phone, white with fury, eyes clenched shut. “I don't care if he's fucking clean, Bobby, I don't care if you knew or not, next time you fucking call me, or you back him up yourself.” 

He snaps the phone shut and throws it on the bed. Adam doesn't know why he's so surprised. As if any of them had any control over Sam, who probably sauntered in to see Crowley and was greeted as an old companion.

::

It takes them fourteen hours to get to Bobby's and they rock up at the same time as Ellen and Jo, who walk up the porch steps with the same hunch-shouldered bone-weariness Adam feels. Bobby grimaces extravagantly.

“You ladies taken a shower since last we met?” 

"Shut up, you old coot," says Ellen, slaps him on the back and moves into the house. Jo gives him a quick hug.

"Got anything to drink?"

"No, I threw it out for Jesus."

Jo rolls her eyes and follows her mom in. 

“It's gonna be a while,” Bobby says, directing these last words at Dean, who's grabbing hold of the rail and sitting stiffly on the step, showing no signs of hearing or caring. 

Bobby clears his throat.

“Hi, Bobby,” Adam says.

"Well, don't just stand there like an idjit." Bobby steps back into the house, holding the screen open. 

"Adam, get me a beer?"

"Get it yourself," Bobby says. Adam looks at Dean.

"I'll be in in a bit," Dean says, but he stays out there past sunset and into the dark, sipping the beer Cas brings him, as Adam sits at the table listening to Bobby lay out the vast scope of this war, a shrinking, quailing feeling clutching at this stomach until tyres crunch on gravel and light plays across the wall behind them.

"Is that a goddamn Prius?" Jo says at the window, fidgeting with the sill.

"Kid's been out west too long," Bobby says. Adam wonders how grey you have to be before you stop being a kid to some people.

They come in ten minutes later and they both look wrong, so strange to see Dean's smile reach his eyes, the relaxed line of his shoulders, and Sam is too tan, too tired; he has a split lip and a black eye, both about a day old, half-covered by his hair, too long, and greasy. His eyes are clear though, alert and some kind of grateful or relieved, seeing them all for the first time in months, crinkling up at the sides as he greets them. He gives Adam a sidelong hug like they're old friends and Adam can feel the knobs of his spine through shirts and jacket.

Dean puts the Colt on the table and they all stare at it for a while, its curves and copperplate lettering, the woodgrain of its handle, dead and inert. It would fit in Adam's hand nicely, he thinks, but it would have been too small for John.

“I guess we gotta trust it,” Jo says.

“I guess so,” says Bobby, and lines them up against the wall to take a photo, setting up the autoshot, darting around to crouch in front of them.

“Tomorrow we hunt the Devil,” says Castiel, in the space between the beeps. “Trust will not improve our chances.”

Ellen and Bobby move onto the whiskey after that, and into the lounge, heads bent over a map of Carthage; Sam and Dean follow them and sit on the couch, an awkward too-small space between them, quiet, muttering, occasionally offering Bobby and Ellen advice, Dean swearing that there's no way he'll risk the Impala so they'll have to pull something out of Bobby's junkyard.

Adam stays at the table with Castiel standing motionless behind him and Bobby's translation of the book he stole in Colorado open in front, and it turns out to be a version of Revelation, deeply unorthodox and punishing, blood and death and entrails, skulls laid out in black and white until the end of time; in this version, Lucifer is beautiful, and his wings blot out the sun.

Jo sits down opposite him, plunks her beer on the table and holds up a deck of cards.

“Hold 'em?”

Adam nods, puts the manuscript aside. Sam and Dean taught him this one about a month in. He never quite got it right, always mixing up his strategy with what John taught him for five-card draw. She shuffles and deals, and as they play her eyes flick past his shoulder into the lounge. He wonders which one of them it is for her. She and Sam would look amazing together, he thinks, dark and light, and she's almost as tiny as Ruby was. She catches his gaze and narrows her eyes.

"What?"

He shrugs, which seems to amuse her. She takes a drink and looks up at Castiel.

"Hey angel, if we let you play, you promise not to cheat?"

“I can only be as I am,” Castiel says gravely, sitting. Jo rolls her eyes.

“Well that's a lie, you've already broken all the rules there are. Just don't get all up in my cards and we'll be fine.”

Castiel looks taken aback. 

“Hey Cas, pass me that box,” Adam smiles, and tips out handfuls of rice krispies in front of each of them. “There, now we're all millionaires.”

Jo grins at him and they each toss a few in the centre.

“Hope you both brought your balls,” she says, dealing the flop. “We'll need them tomorrow."

Her mother had said she wasn't ready, but this girl looks like she could take on anything; bravado in there sure, but how much he can't tell. She seems so unafraid, golden and smooth-skinned and capable, throwing in her cereal, peeking at Castiel's hand. She comes from somewhere whole and strong, sturdy and full enough to offer up her spare laughs and her courage.

“Two pair,” Adam says, showing his cards, and she's delighted, winks at him.

"Yahtzee," says Castiel.

::

They are waylaid long before they make it to Jasper's Field, Castiel disappearing point blank five minutes after they arrive, and Adam feels the entire mission tip into disaster.

It's a good thing Hellhounds can't climb ladders because it's the only way they make it out of downtown, fleeing through damp alleyways, ears aching with growls and the shotgun blasts Dean and Bobby lay down as cover, until Adam finds an open hardware store complete with gas bottles and the sheer goddamn luck of a backroom window and a fire escape. Jo is the one who has to set the fuse, the fastest through those tight spaces, and she appears to them like a superhero as they wait on the next roof, her leaping silhouette thrown forward in the unfolding roar of the explosion, landing rough and skinned on the asphalt. 

Ellen pulls her to her feet and they race west through the scant deserted streets. In a field a half mile away Lucifer, surrounded by unseeing demons, sits inside some poor guy and Adam has to wonder how anyone could possibly consent; it is obviously too much for the body, skin beginning to slough away, hands and face the same inhuman gray colour of men and women he'd slept next to in ICU back in the day, people staring down the end. But he smiles at them like he's ready for them; like he loves them.

“I don't suppose you'd say yes right now?” 

“It's never gonna happen,” says Sam, and Dean holds up his father's gun, a careworn barrel-to-temple staging from before time and when he pulls the trigger Lucifer's body collapses. Adam grabs Sam's elbow, feeling Ellen clutching at Jo with the same cringing instinct, lizard brains rearing up to have such power disappear, wrongness such that he is practically grateful when Lucifer sighs and pushes himself to his feet. 

He walks over to them, steps heavy and sorrowful. He smells of rot, and something deeper and purer, like the night after a cleansing rain. None of them can move. 

Lucifer looks at Sam sadly.

“I'll see you,” he says, reaching out with a swollen hand to Sam's face, words trailing on the wind of angel feathers as Castiel slams them up and away, through sucked-out air and down into the tumbled mud of Bobby's yard.

::

Sam stops as they pass the Impala and Dean, who was walking with an arm around Jo's waist, keeping her upright and moving, hands her over to her mother and turns to Sam and it is starting again apparently, this wordless steamrolling mania, Adam doesn't know how to stop it, but he takes them a couple of beers anyway; at least they'll stay outside.

They are silent, resting on the hood.

"Good work today," Dean says, tired sardonic smile, and the silence stretches out uncomfortably. Sam coughs once or twice.

Adam looks back at the house, light shining through the windows.

"See you," he says to Sam, and gets a surprised, startlingly sad look in return, like Sam had thought he got to push some kind of reset button after what he did, after the blood and pretense and the stories he spun out so smoothly.

“Adam,” he says, but Adam is already gone.

::

Inside it's like the previous night, beer and whiskey except Jo's hair is singed and Sam and Dean don't come in for hours. They can all barely move, overnumbed and blank-eyed. Adam doesn't know about the rest of them but he had kind of prepared on not having to have to deal with the rest of the day; the anticlimax of it leaves him hollow and useless.

“Well I wasn't expecting to have to stare at all your moping faces all night,” Ellen says, an arm around Jo's neck, face turned to the top of her daughter's head, but she doesn't have deal with all of their faces as it turns out, because a car coughs to life outside and five minutes later Dean comes inside alone, rustles Jo's hair and takes himself and his bottle upstairs.

::

They pump gas and eat at diners and kill wraiths and shifters and lay ghosts to rest like running on a hamster wheel, an efficiency of purpose that sometimes feels like clockwork and sometimes like he barely exists in the face of Dean's increasing indifference.

He is a drunk, Adam begins to realise, or has opened the gate to it. Addiction, then, is in their blood, flowing down Winchester tributaries, waiting in his veins like the prostate cancer his Pop died from, whatever weakness of heart or gene that hadn't had time to reveal itself in his mother. Maybe John had been a drunk too, or a junkie – Adam can't remember seeing him drink more than a couple of beers but Dean drinks like he knows how it's done, bending over the bathroom tap five minutes before he passes out, sucking down water in loud gulps that set Adam's teeth on edge nightly; other sounds he grows to hate are the slosh of a bottle of Jack, and the ring of the lid of Dean's flask. This last one encroaches more and more into the afternoon, always after they've finished their recon or research or kill, Dean growing heavy-lidded and soft around the edges like he's being erased, as the hours and days wear on.

::

They chase a rare warm day south into rural Louisiana, dappling in and out of the tree-lined creek crossings that weave their way through the fields. The land is flat as a table, and many of the houses close to the road, single-story and efficient, every fifth or sixth one ringed with pickup trucks and people filing in with tea-towel-covered pie dishes and laden down with wrapped presents.

They spend that night in a motel in Bunkie, next door to a Pizza Hut and across the road from a McDonald's. Waiting for their pizza to be ready Dean flicks dissatisfied through the TV, bottle already cracked and corners of his mouth turned down. Adam fishes around in his duffel and pulls out the DVD he stole from a gas station, and hands it over to him.

“We could watch this,” he says, heart beating fast. They've never said anything about Christmas or presents, never given any indication of family ritual or tradition, and he couldn't force anything now, not inadequate as he is.

“ _Die Hard?_ ” Dean says, a little gobsmacked, turning it over. 

“Yeah, you like it?”

“Show me the man who doesn't, and I'll kick his ass.” Dean smiles at him and hands it back. “Put it on.”

“Sure,” he says, and gets the laptop out, and as he's fiddling with the media player Dean drops a few shirts on the table next to him.

“I'm gonna go grab the pizza,” he says gruffly and heads off, leaving Adam alone to pick through them, a couple of his old ones that he'd thought he'd lost, a couple of new ones, all with the right arm neatly trimmed and resewn. He rubs the mend through his fingers, feeling the hard little nubs of cheap black thread tied off in the softness of the flannel, the patterns blurring through his tears that come fast and breathless enough to hurt, pushing behind his eyes and tearing at his throat, soundless and hot. He wipes at his face with the shirt he's holding and briefly hates Dean for turning him back to the tree in his mother's house, eggnog and lasagna and just him and her, and the warmth two people can create between them.

Jo calls him later, just as Gruber gets the vault open. She's after a spell out of John's diary; Dean had startled at the ring of the phone, more attention than he'd paid for the last half hour, disappearing at some point into his glass and somewhere further away, his disappointment when Adam said Jo's name sharp and sour and clear on his face.

“How's it going?” she asks, and Adam's paralysed. Does she mean the hunt, or Dean, or him? It's too big a question, and he can feel Ellen's instruction on the other end. It surprises him that he doesn't mind.

“Fine,” he says, hedging his bets. “Over there?”

“All quiet on the western front,” she says, and he wonders if she's near Sam, who checked in this morning from what Google tells them is a random diner in Utah, his text expanded this time to include Christmas wishes in slightly forlorn lowercase. “Or it would be if Mom let me drive for once,” these last few words raised in volume, not only for his ears, “so we could actually _cover some ground_.”

“I'd let you drive,” he says, grinning.

“Well thank you. Maybe I should hunt with you. In this household, a girl falls asleep at the wheel once and suddenly she can't be trusted.”

Adam laughs and it feels like breaking ice, opening up raw channels in his chest. When she hangs up he's a little let down, picturing her and her mom forging their household in the same anonymous motel he and Dean have camped in, eating candy and bickering over the remote and adding extra brandy to their Pennsylvania Dutch.

::

Castiel tells them about a town and it shines out straight away that something's off; the whole town acting like people but more so, weirdly intensified; there is a couple that have literally eaten each other to death on her kitchen floor and it twists Adam inside out, makes his arm throb. He stands in the kitchen looking at the stain, so red it turns the rest of the world grey.

Dean takes Adam's elbow and leads him through to the living room.

"Did Alice date very much?" he asks the friend, another in the series of beautiful distraught young women they have to interview; Adam keeps his attention on the soft twist of her hair, her broken-down face, notices the way even now that she can't help respond to Dean sitting there in front of her but Dean is detached today, all business. 

She fills them in and it's the standard story again, desire, need, violence, all the things that tap through weak defences into subterranean lakes. Adam can feel it drilling at him, too, in this small Windomish town, walking past drugstores and banks like his Pop used to work at. The bar where they end up, where Castiel eventually finds them, could have been the one where he first tried out his fake ID, where Gary had thrown up in the urinal, each of them drunk and freaking out as their moms left increasingly angry messages on their voicemail. 

It's several hours and Dean is drunk, drunker than he usually gets, and not angry or loud but the bar is kind of classy and they eventually knock him back. Sitting there all night has given Adam a gnawing hunger though, opening up in the pit of his stomach and he takes them down the block to a burger joint, where Castiel proceeds to demolish five double-meat burgers.

“Hamburgers are delicious,” he says, ground meat in his mouth turning Adam's hunger sour. 

Dean puts down his burger too. Adam can't blame him but wishes he'd try to soak up some of the booze.

“You good?”

“Fine,” says Dean, the lie huge and obvious.

The next day they hit up the morgue. Dr Corman is a great old dude, touring them through packed away organs, clinical and gruesome. There have been more deaths overnight, ODs and a brutal murder-suicide, but the bodies contain no clues. 

Dean drops Adam and the car at the motel and takes off again. Adam refuses to watch him leave, sits firmly at the table and opens the laptop and his dad's journal. He has a theory about sirens. He knows, from Dean and Sam and the journal, that this is not the usual siren MO, but something is making these people crazy for each other. He pictures some kind of orgy nearby that's seeping pheromones into the air; or could one have died, maybe, sinking to the bottom of the water supply as its child watched from the bank, trees towering overhead and the night closing in? 

He wipes at his cheeks, baffled, and leaves the research behind, wrapping himself in a blanket and turning on the TV. Four hours later he's watching _Bewitched_ reruns and mechanically chewing lukewarm pizza when Dean stumbles in, bleary-eyed, whiskey on his breath, bottle in hand. 

"Oh man, Elizabeth Montgomery." He sits down next to Adam and bumps his shoulder, and they pass the bottle back and forth for a few minutes, warmth spreading through him, cheap jokes and laughter brightly technicolour like a funhouse mirror. Dean steals a slice, makes a face and throws the remainder in the box.

"We used to watch this all afternoon when we could. They'd have marathons all the time. This and _The Jetsons_. Sam used to love _The Jetsons._ "

"Yeah, I'll take _Betwitched._ "

"He used to pick apart all the science stuff," Dean says through a parody of his usual inward fond smile, rubs a hand across his face and looks at Adam, red-eyed, red nosed from the cold, stubble on sagging cheeks; it makes Adam wonder suddenly if he's ever seen Dean this far gone, not drunk so much as just, away. And even like this, he's outrageously good-looking, his cheekbones sharp and eyelashes long and fine, probably been laid at least once tonight, some barfly or waitress, short skirt hiked up in an alley somewhere. It must be so easy for him, to look like that. 

"Hey," Dean says, stops, licks his lips. Adam waits it out, lifts an eyebrow and Dean puts his hand on Adam's shoulder and winces like he's been burned, stands and walks over to grab a greasy motel tumbler, chatter of glass as he pours. 

"You doing okay, Adam?"

"Sure," he says, because there's not much else he can say, and he's scared to turn the question around. 

"Yeah. Jesus." Dean downs the glass, grabs his jacket. "I'm just gonna," points to the door and disappears again, wandering out into the dark, easy fodder for trucks and sirens and any random asshole in this deadly town who wants to take him away, who could look at him without knowing that this is Adam's brother, who should not be made to leave.

::

He comes back at some point while Adam's asleep and the next day he doesn't even bother getting up, probably too hungover anyway, doesn't open his eyes as Adam makes himself some chemical-tasting single-sachet coffee, doesn't even sit up as Adam tightens his tie and slips his jacket on, slips his mother and the photo from Bobby's into his jacket pocket next to his FBI badge, unwilling to venture out alone.

“Well fuck you then,” Adam says, can't even tell if it hits.

The few people out on the street look wrong, walk wrong, like they are all holding themselves around something invisible. It's eerie. At the mortuary no one answers his calls so he heads down anyway and encounters the mortician laid out on a slab himself, distended, stinking: a glance at the clipboard shows that he drank himself to death: found surrounded by three empty bottles of Jim.

The first little flutter of panic starts up in the back of Adam's mind. He wonders how many bottles fill the dumpster outside the back of their room by now. Did Dean shake the mortician's hand? Maybe get sneezed on? He checks the sheets on the couple that ate each other but there was only a negligible amount of alcohol in their systems. 

On the walk back he passes a woman sitting on a bench, brown hair gone mostly grey, lank down to her shoulders. She is crying, sobbing really, and Adam backtracks and sits by her. 

“You okay?” he asks and she hunches, hands clawing at greasy hair. A man walks past without even giving them the side-eye; everyone's eyes have turned inward, and no one likes what they see. He pats her back and she tips softly into him and his shoulder is immediately damp. He keeps patting her, at a loss for comforting words; he always hated it when people did this to him, feeling trapped, his skin irritable under their hands, his mom the only person he could stand it from. Her cardigan is thin and soft and he thinks she's not wearing a bra. He sat down thinking he could make a difference but ultimately this woman is nothing to him, and when she cries herself out he stands and tells her to go home. It is the only solution for anything, really; she surely has a son, a husband, friends, people somewhere in this town to look after her. 

“Don't go,” she says, puffy, bloodshot, and as he takes a few more steps away: “Please! Come back, please, now.” He keeps walking and she stands and screams obscenities at his back, screams to him that she needs him. 

Back at the motel Dean has moved from the bed to the bathroom, a predictable progression, but he doesn't emerge for the rest of the day, and eventually Adam gets sick of kicking the bathroom door every couple of hours just to get a semi-alive response, sitting uselessly on his bed in the intervals, trying not to think about how he could clean up whatever is behind that door, how small he is in the face of this town's curse, in the eye of a world that looks unfavourably on the orphaned and unloved.

He calls Sam.

::

Sam, somehow, arrives at two in the morning, a full three hours before Adam had thought to expect him, and his hammering on the door is shocking in the barren night. He gets up groggy, pushing away dreams of the crypt, clutching hands and his mother's blood, and is poleaxed at the wave of relief he feels looking at Sam's distorted, worried face through the peephole.

“Sam,” he says, opening the door, hearing his voice break, feeling his bottom lip threaten to quiver. Sam looks him up and down and wraps him in long-armed clutching hug, crushing Adam to his chest. Adam closes his eyes and sets his chin into the groove of Sam's shoulder and breathes in the unwashed miles of him, and something settles into place.

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

“Dean.” Sam is shocked, ribs expanding under Adam's hand, and turning around Adam can see what Sam sees, long slow slide into lost pounds carved into Dean's face, bruised and sunken eyes in a blanched face. How could Adam have let this happen to him?

“Did you call him?” Dean demands. He rearranges himself, white-knuckle grip on the doorframe like he can eliminate Sam entirely. 

“Dean,” Adam says, and can't continue, hysteria closing around his throat. 

“I'm fine. I'll be fine if he goes,” Dean says, and breaks, and looks at Sam, helplessness thinning out his voice. “Sammy. I can't. If you're here, I can't--”

Sam puts a heavy hand on Adam's shoulder and pulls him outside, goes inside and shuts the door. Dean's snarled _fuck off_ slips out, and the sound a bottle tumbling on the cheap lino of the bathroom floor.

Adam stands in the cold, breath frosting, door and curtains closed against him, no further noise leaking from within. He waits, stares at Sam's beige hatchback sitting calmly next to the Impala, oddities amongst the people-movers that are the few other cars in the lot. His mother had had no particular affinity or affection for cars, had driven the same white Nissan Sentra for the last thirteen years of her life, and cars had never really captured Adam's imagination either, his boyhood walls plain, shelves filled with Gameboy cartridges and Magic Eye books. His mother, who is not here, nor his father, nor anyone he's ever known except for these two strangers who revolve around a hollow centre that is not him. 

Sam comes out, scuffled and mussed, and says words that disappear in the night. Adam looks to him, weak-kneed, light-headed like he could fall away into the wind, and Sam keeps talking, moving, until his hands are on either side of Adam's face, holding him steady, head ducked, eyes direct. 

“Adam, listen to me. I don't know what's happening here but I think that longer I'm here, the more it'll affect me. I need you with me on this.”

Adam blinks, remembers Dr Corman with his bottles, Sam with his blood. 

“Dean?” he asks. Sam looks grim. 

“He's unconscious. Where's Cas?”

Adam had entirely forgotten about Castiel, but when they call it turns out he's at a 24-hour burger joint on the edge of town, having been kicked out of three successive, more local ones. They sit down opposite him. The place is packed, too packed for this time of night, booths and benches full of people eating like it's a placeholder, vacant and preoccupied. Sam clears his throat and Castiel looks up, still chewing.

“I think we can assume this has something to do with things people gave up, or. Or things they want.” Sam takes a deep breath and names a Horseman, resolving the last two days into a clear picture.

“I really want burgers,” Castiel says, said burgers falling out the side of his mouth.

“The mortician drank himself to death,” Adam says. “He was on the wagon.”

Sam looks at him, questioning.

“No, Dean wasn't on the wagon,” Adam says, swallowing a wild laugh at the thought of that word describing the emptiness of the bottles and rooms and conversations littering the nights stretching out behind them and the plunge off the cliff the further they penetrated this motherless town.

His hand is covered by Sam's.

“You're feeling it.”

Adam shakes his head, examining himself for the desire to drink, eat, fuck; it's distracting with Sam's hand over his, warmth soaking through to the bone, like Sam cares. Why hadn't he behaved like this before? Couldn't he have – couldn't he have treated Adam like a brother instead of a tool? Couldn't he have tried to give Adam back what he'd lost, for real?

The door dings and an entourage rolls in, five suits surrounding an old man thin and wrinkled as a sketch, slumped into a wheelchair, oxygen tube under his nose. He sucks in a breath and meets Adam's eye, and Adam is hit broadside by a bottomless wave of sorrow; his throat burns with loss, his vision swims, and he grabs out at Sam's hand as Sam begins to stand. He has a sudden picture of pulling Sam down to him, into him until they are somehow one and his brother who is so tall and immovable, who hunts monsters and saves peoples' lives, who leased away his humanity for his family, can chase it all away, chase away the gaps and griefs he found in a crypt in what was supposed to be his home. He clutches and scrabbles and Sam, half standing, slaps him, careful and measured; light bursts red across his vision.

There is blood under Adam's fingernails. There are furrows on Sam's arm, climbing up from his wrist, and fifty people in the room that didn't even notice.

“Demons,” Castiel says, and stands as well; Adam prepares himself for the blinding light, but Castiel disappears into the kitchen. Sam barely spares him a glance, eyes flicking between the suits spreading out in formation.

“Can you do this?” he asks. Adam nods, and pops the holsters of his demon-killing knife, his gun.

“Can you?” A spark of fear flares in Sam's eyes before he tamps it down. 

The man – it's not a man, it's the thing that has seeped black longing into Adam's heart every minute for the last two days until want for his mother or brother someone he could hold himself to had curdled him – looks at them crooked and shrunken, cackling with delight. He is so happy that they are imperfect, lacking. His eyes light up when he sees Adam's missing arm. Sam, so tall and broad it seems he could never want for anything, sends him right over the top.

“The other Mr Winchester,” he rasps. “So much hunger you hardly know where to look.”

It is brief and chaotic and over sooner than he expects, and just as bloody. He tries to keep an eye on Sam but it's impossible as three demons back him into a booth and the other two come at Adam in tandem. He empties his clip into both of them, explosively loud in this room of tile and glass, and people finally cower and try to flee, screaming and pushing their way through, knocking the demons back enough for him to chase them down with the knife, stabbing one in the chest before turning to take the other out. A third, one of Sam's, on the floor, grabs at him, and he kicks at her until Sam can pull her away, giving him time to slash her throat, her blood pouring out thick and hot. 

Sam moans and wrenches himself away, picks up a stool and smashes another in the face and it goes down like a stone. He bends down and grabs it by its shirt and punches it, over and again, blood splashing onto his hand, red spots dotting his face.

“Do it,” Famine hisses, leaning forward in his chair, clutching at the handles.

“Okay,” says Adam, and cuts off his finger.

::

So Famine delivers his family back to him, Sam and Dean in the front seat again, Sam's beige thing shrinking in the rearview. Sitting in the backseat Adam can see Sam's hair is still a little damp, curling and dark from the quick rinse they gave him as soon as they were far enough away to stop, pulling over to the shoulder with fire trucks whistling past towards the restaurant ablaze behind them and Castiel off who knew where to deal with his indigestion.

Dean had been terrified to see the blood on their clothes when they got back to him at the motel, finding him grey and exhausted and still a little drunk. He'd lifted his hand to Sam's chin and dropped it halfway, but Sam had said, _it's okay_ , and smiled, and Adam had held up the ring.

::

Sam dreams of Lucifer most nights, wakes pinched and unrested, spends twenty minutes sitting on the side of his bed before he can get up. Adam fetches him coffee and sits by him on the thin off-white sheets while Dean packs their bags and restores the room.

“He talks, just on and on,” Sam says, rubbing his fingers into his eyes, voice cracking and dry as though it were overused. “He wants this. I don't know how we're going to get out of it.”

Sam has been dealing with this alone, out west, no one to wake to, no one to tell him it would all work out. Adam feels hopelessly sad for him in that moment, remembers being eaten in a crypt, facing down a certainty. His mother had looked that certainty in the eye and had lost to it; Adam had gotten away. His brothers too, each of them, in their own time. 

“How much more can they do to you?” he says, and Sam huffs an ironic laugh.

“He tells me about Heaven. Michael is his brother, and they fought. He's so bitter he could poison rivers with it. Michael called him a freak. And cast him out.” 

These words fall into the room, suddenly still and airless.

“On and on. They can hurt you,” Sam mutters down at his feet, like he's afraid Adam will resent him for this, the next time Zachariah comes calling.

“How much more can they do to _me_?” Adam says. Dean puts a hand on Sam's shoulder and attempts a wan smile in Adam's direction. It's like he can see Adam again all of a sudden now that Sam's back, the three of them real and embodied again, tiny in a room in the wilderness. 

“It's not fair,” Adam says. “They'll see.”

::

They won't, Adam knows, when they walk back into their room after dinner and find their feet glued to the floor, Zachariah sitting genially on Dean's bed, propped up against the headboard, legs stretched out over the covers. Adam, mid-step, overbalances and can't save himself with one arm, wrenches his ankle and hits his elbow on the thinly carpeted floor with a bang.

“I don't think you children understand how important this is,” Zachariah says, and with a twist of his hand throws Sam to the ground, where he groans darkly and spasms, eyes closed, the cords of his neck taut and dire. “This sack of pus is going to give haven to Lucifer. The Prince of Darkness. The Great Destroyer. The Father of Murder. Do you think these names are accidents?”

Sam cries out again, fingers twitching up like a dying spider and Dean's hand materialises a gun, raised at the angel's head; before he pulls the trigger he is tossed into a wall himself, held a foot off the ground spread-eagled, gun bouncing off the carpet, straining to push off, eyes locked on Sam.

“Fuck you!” Adam yells, words tearing out his throat, terrified by the way Zachariah is eyeing each of his brothers in turn. He could kill Sam right now, if he was so certain Sam would capitulate to the Devil; he could hurt Dean for good. “Hey! Asshole! You're supposed to be doing God's work!”

Zachariah raises an eyebrow, looking direct at Adam like he's seeing him for the first time. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands in a fluid movement. His eyes are pale and washed out, bottomless, pitiless. Adam shrinks back under them. 

“Well it's _God_ , and it's what's _happening_ , so how about we go with _yes_ , it is His work, and His wish, and His will, for you all to suck it up and do what you're _going_ to do already.”

They are released, suddenly, Dean falling hard to the ground, Sam and Adam rolling over in relief. Zachariah's lip is curled with scorn. 

“You think this is bad? It's going to get a whole lot worse, boys. I want you to think about that.” He smiles a little, turning his head to Adam, and an uneasy chill spreads through him, black and sickening. “I'll see you soon.”

::

Castiel tells them that they can be found despite the Enochian sigils under their flesh, through a network of God-talkers that are supplied with their faces. Cas and another angel named Anna are keeping their ears to the official channels, and will warn them when they can.

In the meantime they get as far away as possible from where Zachariah found them, tumbling across borders and rivers and county signs, blipping past mile markers and Town Halls and roaring semi-trailers. They keep to themselves, staying mostly off numbered highways, and pay cash everywhere, noting down possible jobs but refusing them as destinations, bedding down at night in the usual motels and abandoned homes and once a barn in the middle of nowhere, rising in the morning to a frost-dusted field that held their footprints as they left.

Adam is happy to be returned to the backseat, enjoying the space to spread out his books and snacks, the ability to shift from left to right depending on the most interesting scenery, and it feels right, like he's rehabilitating the first time this happened, his brothers up front with their secrets exposed now and talking to each other still stilted but increasingly warm, throwing lines and connections back for Adam to arbitrate on: California redwoods vs Connecticut maples, AC/DC vs Guns N Roses, Han Solo vs Indiana Jones.

When they tire of bickering, retreading worn childhood arguments with a restorative nostalgia that even Adam can feel, Sam tells them stories of his time out west, vamp nests bubbling out of small-town hospitals and a deranged shifter cutting down little kids, looking for a mommy of its own. He talks around wide gaps, unspoken days and nights and fights with no backup. He is stronger and firmer and more decisive in his action, maybe even a better fighter than Dean now, although he keeps his hands to himself, is less expansive and forward with Dean and Adam than he used to be, turns his eyes away quickly when talking face-to-face.

Dean must be drinking less, or is hiding it well and taking it better at least, lasting far further into the night than he used to and waking far more easily. He can bear the day now, Adam sees, and puts away the worm of hurt at the thought, because he understands, it does work better to have a third, who can deflect and open up feedback loops and wallpaper over threatening cracks. When Sam gets Adam alone for a moment and tries haltingly to apologise for corrupting himself, for lying to them, choosing a demon over them, Adam is able to tell him no worries and head outside to help Dean wash the car. 

They move like this for three whole weeks that feel increasingly like a time-out, or a reading week without the reading, a diffuse low-grade anxiety about something looming at the end, but he counts himself lucky for having it, and accepts the worry. They are unbothered except for Sam's dreams, and even they take less of a toll, as his brothers begin again to open up towards each other, as Dean starts to eat again like he used to, and Sam relaxes his shoulders out of their lonely hunch. Even Adam can feel something stronger seeping into his heart and bones, feels his marrow settle in preparation.

::

He wakes to Zachariah's warm, paternal hand on his shoulder. The room is otherwise empty, shadows lying eerily across the floor like they were waiting for him to be alone. He can't tell if it's a dream.

“So you know you can't trust, them, right?” Zachariah says, confidential and matter-of-fact, like a doctor. He's sitting on the bed again, his hip by Adam's head. “You know that Sam and Dean Winchester are psychotically, irrationally, erotically co-dependent. You? You're no one. Do you really think that when it comes down to it, they will choose you?”

Adam sits up, shrugging away his hand.

“Why are you talking to me?”

“This is the Apocalypse, Adam. This is the Devil we're talking about. Don't you want to help?”

“If you think I can make them change their minds, you don't know them at all.”

“Oh, I think I know them.” Zachariah smirks. “Louisville's just over those hills, isn't it? How many people live there do you think? How many of them will die, how many will suffer when the Devil ascends?”

“What do you want?”

“You are John Winchester's blood too, Adam.” He leans in close. His breath has no scent, no warmth. “You could be Michael's vessel.”

Adam, shocked, laughs at him, laughs in his offended face and then has the air torn from his lungs as Zachariah jumps him out of the motel. They're standing on a dirt road next to the Impala, some kind of access road rolling away into the depths of a forest, full moon spotting through the oaks above. There's something moving in the car, someone – two someones, Adam sees as he bends down, crushed into the backseat and Dean's mouth shapes gasping breathless words as Sam tips Dean's head back to get at his neck, and his eyes look straight through Adam. 

“You're lying,” Adam whispers and Zachariah laughs, says something that Adam cannot hear over the sick churn in his gut, the furious blood pounding in his ears. Adam hates them for making Zachariah right, hates them for this brutal disabusal, stands there watching as Dean grabs his brother's hair and pulls him back to see him, as Sam's hand slips between their bodies, and hates them all, cruelly and sharply, until Zachariah deposits him back at the room. 

“I look forward to your call,” he says, almost kindly, and disappears. 

Adam barely notices. He packs his duffel blindly and heads to the highway, hitches a ride on a semi-trailer that shines dully red under the full moon.

 

**Part 4. Sounds like a smart woman.**

The man is trucking north and when in Cedar Rapids he finds another truck running towards Dakota, Adam figures he may as well make his way back to Sioux Falls. He arrives outside of town the next day, finds a room at a no-tell motel and tries to remember the way to Bobby's. He doesn't get much past cataloguing the sins of others, Bobby knocking on the door half an hour after he arrives, which Adam has to grudgingly admire.

“I hunted a vamp nest at this place once,” he says, nose wrinkled in distaste. “You wanna know how many rats I found in the process?”

Bobby's house hasn't changed, is still like something out of one of Gary's Choose Your Own Adventure books, dark library on the front cover with skulls peeping and witchy paraphernalia waiting in the shadows, a trapdoor in the closet that drops down into the panic room. He drops his duffel with a thud for the second time that day.

“I'm gonna let them know you're alive, at least.”

“I don't want to see them,” he says, though a tight throat. Bobby raises his eyebrow but is mercifully silent.

He sits on the couch and it puffs up a musty smell, as tattooed with dubious stains as any couch he's seen in any motel, and stares out through the doorway to the kitchen, out the kitchen windows. He never wants to see them again. He can barely think their names. It hadn't been like this in the hospital, hadn't been this deep-set ache, nauseous and unfinished; he'd let go of Ru so easily, of Gary and the guys and the neighbourhood cat that sometimes scavenged his good will for a meal. They had been tied to him so lightly, in the end, as lightly tied as the Adam that had died in a crypt, in the backseat of a sleek black car. Born again, a babe in the world only just now realising he'd tied himself back down as they cut the lines and set him free.

::

Bobby watches him warily and conducts hushed phone conversations that Adam can't tell if he's intended to overhear or not. He spends a lot of time out back practicing with a few of Bobby's shotguns, which are too heavy for him to aim effectively but are surprisingly easier to handle on recoil, especially the sawn-off.

“Well at least put your goddamn ear protection on,” Bobby yells at him twice a day, but he always ends up taking them off again, the shots like a slap to the face, chasing away thought and feeling and his mother's unvisited grave two hours over the border. 

“Wanna help me with this truck?” Bobby offers another time, but Adam is not interested in cars. He is not Dean.

Three days in he shares a nightcap with Bobby, who always has a smudge of engine grease on his cheek and newspaper ink on his fingers, and asleep on the couch he dreams something bright and wonderful, so far away from the last few days he knows his cheeks will be wet when he wakes. The end of his senior year and his mom is taking him through is bio practice exam; they sit next to each other at the round table in the kitchen, light suffused and golden and full of the sweet clean rose of her perfume. She's so proud of him; she kisses him on the temple and her hands are strong and chapped from handwashing. 

“You know who took this from you, don't you?” Zachariah says, leaning in the chair opposite.

His mother leaves, her back disappearing through the doorway into the gloom. He is crushed; had thought for a moment she could protect him from the loss of her, but she is gone, and will go and go, and will always be gone.

“Winchesters. They don't know what family is, Adam. But you know. We know. The Archangel Michael: he knows. He loves you and he needs you, Adam. It's time to say yes.”

He shakes his head, blind.

“And we can make it worth your while. We can take you to her. That's easy.”

If Adam's throat wasn't choked with pain, if his hands, dual and whole, weren't claws with desperate longing to hold something he can't, he'd be offended at such blind arrogant assurance that in giving Adam this dream and then taking it away Adam will somehow believe him, and kowtow, and come to praise and thank him for turning his mother into a treat for a good little dog.

“No,” he says, and over again, and when he wakes he is still moaning it, deep into the folds of the couch, into the truncated bicep of his stump, and he covers his head with his other arm and cries in the dawn, fierce and hot and bottomless.

::

Ellen and Jo come through on their way south, dropping noise and chaos into Bobby's house with tales of banshees and shtrigas and mustang spirits tramping a notorious breaking yard deep into the dirt of Montana. Jo's hair is a long wild plait down her back and she grins wide and surprised when she sees him, hides her disappointment well enough when Sam and Dean aren't forthcoming.

Ellen and Bobby are muttering off to the side, Ellen shaking her head, lips pressed tight.

“We think there's a Kappa in Arkansas,” Jo says. “They're so creepy. Do you know how to bow?”

They get the info they need, and coffee and a drink and a good night's sleep and when they head out Adam is in the backseat.

::

He'd packed a gun and at least two knives that don't by any definition belong to him; not that any of it had ever been his, always handed over or possibly even down, father to brother to Adam. But maybe they stop counting as hand-me-downs, if you leave.

He takes out the memory sometimes and turns it over, feels the bitterness wash over him again. You don't do that to someone, he thinks; you don't bring them along if you don't mean it. You don't take someone in and then all along have your own thing. How annoying he must have been: intruding on their space, their time, an unwanted burden. Dean had known from the start. He and Sam should have listened.

::

The Kappa has been killing women for months now, leaving a trail of mauled and violated bodies all down the Mississippi. The one witness they can track down is a DJ at the Swan Lake Gentlemen's Club of Helena, and Adam's skin crawls at the reception Jo and Ellen get when the three of them head in to talk to her; none of the men take him seriously, and Ellen almost breaks the finger of one particularly gross specimen.

The DJ is just as much of a dick, doesn't really care that she was the last person to see Sheree Sommers alive, but her greed is easily appealed to, and, first checking they're not police, she spills for a fifty.

“You could earn in here, honey,” she says to Jo, after telling them about last Wednesday night when she was fucking Sheree out by the river, out on a dirt offshoot of Phillips Street, how Sheree had been dragged into the water and died without drowning, how pointless it was to go to the law over a gator killing, seeing as Sheree was married.

“And listen to your shit music?” Jo says. “I'd rather stick my hand in a blender.”

They kill it pretty easy in the end, Ellen dangling her feet in the water, pistol and knife at the ready, Adam by her with his best manners at the ready, Jo on the bank with a harpoon gun. Jo ends up sitting it mostly out and is tasked with chopping the thing up and tossing it piece by piece back in the river. Adam watches her laughing and hefting the axe in the car headlights. Next to him Ellen dries her feet in front of the heater vents, watches her daughter with something like regret in her eyes.

“You came into this too early, Adam,” she says, and he feels his mood plummet as the moment-to-moment time-scale of the hunt expands out to his whole miserable life.

“Too late you mean.”

“That too.”

“They did what they could.”

She raises an eyebrow, nods.

“Tell me about your mom.”

Adam shrugs, lost.

“She was my mom, you know, she looked after me.”

He remembers when he was a little kid on the last day of holidays, anxiety of the switch back to school keeping him awake, the weight of her sitting next to him in bed and her fingers combing through his hair, rubbing the fear out of his scalp.

“She always used to say this thing. When I was scared. _Time keeps moving on._ Like, just get through it, it's gonna happen anyway.”

“Sounds like a smart woman.”

“Not smart enough.”

Ellen mouth turns down at the corners.

“None of us are smart enough for that.”

It certainly hadn't been wisdom that had saved Adam, at least not his wisdom and not the Winchesters Senior or Junior either, who were each more pinball than philosopher, slingshotting from fight to monster to fight without ever picking up the skill of self-reflection. They just did what they wanted, and used who they wanted, and hated themselves, and did it all over again.

“My husband,” she starts, but no, he can't hear another tale of woe, someone else's half-remembered loss twisted into a reflection of his, gaps spackled over with platitudes.

“I think it was a Janis Joplin lyric,” he blurts, and Ellen laughs. 

“That's what I thought.”

“Do you want to see a photo?”

“Course.”

He shows her the memento card, battered around the edges now, corners turned up and down and the white card smudging into grey-brown. Her smile is always the same here at least, forever happy and loved as its counterpart turns to dust inside the ground.

::

It's good to travel with women again, scarfing down burgers in marginally better diners, still staying in shitbox motels but Ellen won't let Jo leave her gear all over the floor, and they smell so much better. He watches Ellen get on Jo's case, correct the way she digs a grave and needle her about the salad pushed to the side of her plate, and that's a special hell of its own, as he waits in a skin-crawling way for that mothering gaze to turn on him; but it never does, and the background buzz of it, reminders and admonishments and frustrated shriek-groans from Jo, slowly settles over his shoulders like a blanket.

Ellen's car is a wagon with a wide, padded seat in the back that suits Adam just fine, sitting amongst the ordered detritus of long-distance travel, cooler and laptop bags, tossed-back jackets and the folded and creased windscreen shade. It's comfy, easier by far than the Impala, which although was well-maintained just did not have the benefits of a modern suspension system, or a quiet engine, or cupholders. He never realised how convenient cupholders were until he could only hold one thing at a time. 

When Jo wants a nap he's ousted to the front seat and occasionally gets to choose the music, flipping through the CD book with a silly sense of power. 

“Dean never let me choose,” he says, putting in _Joshua Tree_ as Ellen hums in approval.

“Dean and that fucking car need to get a room,” Jo says sleepily, and is snoring by the time the cymbals kick in on 'Streets.' Jo likes REO Speedwagon and Led Zepplin and Interpol and Ellen will default to Pink Floyd and Crowded House; both are happy to listen to Golden Oldies radio. It feels like returning to civilisation after a year in the wild.

::

At a gas station in rural Michigan, rusted warehouses and broken-eyed factories twenty miles behind him tingling with the faint ashes of ghosts exorcised that morning, Jo finishes pumping the gas and heads inside to pay; he can see her through the glass browsing the shelves, moving between window frames, overlaid by the reflection of Ellen's car. If he refocuses his eyes he can see himself, his face thinner than he ever thought it could be. When he touches his scar these days he is surprised at how neatly it fits him, a thin white line from his eyebrow to his chin.

“Whatcha thinking?” asks Ellen, twisting around in her seat.

“Nothing much.” Inside, Jo waves and holds up a can of Pringles. He gives her a thumbs up and hopes that she gets two. She can take out a whole can by herself when she gets bored.

“Adam, I have to say, it's a real pleasure to have you along.”

He looks at her, surprised, and she smiles at him. He's kind of embarrassed by how much he likes her smile, how far into her eyes it reaches. She is just a good person, he thinks.

“I mean it. It's been Jo and me for too long. I'm driving her crazy. We used to run a roadhouse, have people, hunters mostly, around all the time. There was a guy who lived in our back room.” 

“What happened?”

“Demons burned it down.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shakes her head. 

“My point is, it's good to have you around.”

Adam swallows. 

“Ellen, I don't even know--”

“But if you start getting any ideas about my daughter, I'll shoot you in the face and dump your body on the roadside.”

She is deadpan, serious, and if not for that he would let his face crack in surprised relief of some unrealised burden, some hangover from his cheerleader-dating past that hadn't yet had time to rear its head.

“Yes, ma'am,” he says, soberly, and she purses her mouth, evaluating.

“Same treatment if you ever call me ma'am again.”

“Yes ma'am,” he says, letting his grin out this time. She reaches out an arm lightning quick and shoves him back against his seat as he laughs, batting her away, and she retreats, cursing his name, and the names of children everywhere.

::

He poses as Jo's work partner often, her brother once, and husband three times. People seem to like the look of them together, especially when they see his arm. They look at him, with his humble smile, hair combed up, shirt buttoned down, and their eyes turn to her, golden with her hair pinned so sweetly. Such a nice girl, he can hear them thinking, to be with a cripple, with a face like that, and isn't he doing well for himself after all his troubles, whatever they must be.

He can never settle into the charades, feeling more fraudulent the nicer and more helpful people are; he wants to shake them and tell them that it was a cost paid without good or service in return, but they are blind, most of them, and it does help, getting into hotel kitchens, Births Deaths Marriages, state libraries, withdrawing names and histories like easy cash. The best part is Jo's not-so-private glee, afterwards, at winning the game, at all the different versions of herself, her discardable wrappers.

::

They stumble across a job in Vermont, overhearing gossip in a post office as they're looking for likely mail to rip off. Jenny's girl Carmen, it seems, has come home early from her yoga retreat after having some kind of breakdown, hallucinating a man turn into a dog.

The civilians at the retreat have lost their scepticism since Carmen's departure, faced with the half-eaten bodies of the yoga teacher and her husband. The eight of them are stranded in a tiny cabin, an island in an encroaching forest that, over the night they spend there, seems shaking with rage, like the natural order is resisting this as much as they are.

The woman who lets them in, Heather, is a dark brunette in pink yoga pants, and she tells them about the friendly stray labrador that hangs around, and how she'd seen the teacher's husband call it in for a feed, watched it turn into a man-like creature and tear into him.

A Rakshasha then, and them without any brass knives. But they do have a file or two in the car with which to whittle down a gong hammer, and that ends up doing the trick nicely. Ellen stabs it in the dark of the new moon and three hours later, in a turn of events that leaves him gobsmacked, he has sex with Heather in the handicapped bathroom of a diner, halfway back to Burlington.

She's older than him and he has no idea what lies behind her, some job maybe where she smiled a lot, crinkles up by her eyes marked by the eyeliner she's rubbed in over the last twenty-four hours. Maybe some kind of doctor because she doesn't care at all about his arm, is happy to kiss him even with his scar, lets him push her shirt up and fumble his way through her bra hooks.

She gets her yoga pants off herself, comes back up naked from the waist down and, only a little shorter than him, hooks a leg up over his hip, pulls him in until he's pressed up against her.

He's only ever had sex in a bed before, and neither of them have had a shower in at least two days; it feels like it should be gross, but it's amazing. He was hard almost from the second she ambushed him and pushed him in here, and when she grinds into him he sees stars and groans deep into her mouth. He wraps his arm around her, keeping her steady against him with his stump hooked under her armpit, his left hand ranging up to her hair, down the strong planes of her back to her ass and further between her legs.

She's so wet, and the moment he touches her she settles herself down onto his fingers and tips her head back. Looking down, he can see her nipples brushing against his chest. 

“Let me out,” he whispers, and she scrabbles at his fly, pulls him out and rolls on a condom and guides him in. They pant curse words in unison, and laugh, and he turns them around, sets her back against the wall and fucks her. He is strong enough, he finds, to hold her up like this, and when she comes she wraps her arms and legs around him like a spider, pushes his head into the junction of her neck and shoulder, so that when he comes inside her it's like he's disappeared from the world altogether. 

Jo knows the second they return and she kicks him under the table, hard on the ankle, far from discreet, and mouths _you fucker_ at him. Ellen, thank God, is rehabilitating one of the other women at the next table and doesn't notice at all. They leave the women in Burlington, Heather throwing him an impersonal wave, and get out of the state, holing up in a motel after a four-hour drive that he barely notices, blissed out and exhausted. 

“I hope you get crabs, you asshole,” Jo says, pulling him out of the car and pushing him down Main Street on a booze-and-food run, leaving Ellen to get the room settled. He stumbles a bit, kicking up gravel. They're in a tourist town in the middle of the mountains still, even the Budget Motel expensive as hell, but the little tree-lined street is pretty and green and he looks around enjoying the phony small-town kitsch of it all.

“Jesus, you'd think you'd never been laid before,” Jo says, then scowls. “Wait, did that woman just deflower you and throw you away?”

Adam laughs.

“Nah, not quite.”

“Been a while though?”

“ _Ages_.”

“Yeah, well, you'll get used to it. At least you're not travelling with your mom.” She slaps her hand across her mouth in horror. “Oh shit, Adam, I'm sorry.”

He smiles at her and puts his arm around her shoulders. 

“Yeah, that must be tough.”

“I'm a vagrant, Adam, maybe you and your brothers can pull it off but it's not that attractive on a girl.”

“Hey, don't worry," he says. “There's all sorts out there. Few months ago in a bar this woman kept buying me drinks. She had to be like thirty or forty. She kept touching my arm.” Adam waves his stump. “And then she whispers in my ear, _I can take it, big boy._ ” 

Jo stops and turns to him, sets her hands on his shoulders and looks him in the eye, her voice flat and deep.

“Are you fucking serious.”

Adam nods and grins.

“Deadly. I practically wet myself. I was so shocked. I felt like someone told me Santa wasn't real. I couldn't have done it even if I wanted to.”

Jo laughs.

“What a disappointment for her.”

“See, there'll be someone out there for you.”

She rolls her eyes.

“I can't wait. Come on, I'm starving.” She hooks her arm through his and they keep walking down to the grocery, and he makes her choose fresh and green pre-made salads with chicken and falafel, and wholegrain chips instead of Pringles, steamrolling over her mutterings about the prices (which are admittedly extortionate), and they eat that night on the balcony, breathing in the crisp high air of the mountains.

::

They lay to rest a poltergeist in a crumbling whitewashed church twenty minutes out of Uniontown and it leaves Adam deeply paranoid for the rest of the day, that goddamn old woman, the way she'd stared at his face, his arm; the way she'd talked about the righteous dead and the faith of God's chosen Pilgrims, who may have been bucolic and sun-kissed but who had taken their share of sin and left behind their share of unrestful spirits. Just Zachariah's sort, and they get out of there quick, heading west and putting two states behind them before finding a suitably shabby motel to stop in.

“We don't even know she was talking to the angels,” Jo says, dumping her bags, and Ellen frowns.

“Oh, she was talking to someone all right.”

“I'm sorry guys,” Adam says, quietly. His heart has been twisting low and afraid for hours, shutting him down.

“They're just bullies Adam, and they can go to Hell,” Ellen says, and twirls her keys, sticks her lockpicks in her back pocket. “Look, we're nearly out of holy oil, and might be we're gonna need it. You two take stock and find out how we are for everything else.”

They haul the boxes and plastic tubs out of the trunk, glad of the cover of night as Jo fishes around in the compartment under the spare tyre for some of the more obscure stuff, and Ellen leaves as they start to lay everything out. The room is quickly and efficiently buried. Adam had no idea they had so much gear, more than Sam and Dean for sure, most of it hidden or disguised, underneath clothes and rolled into tents and dug into boxes of tampons.

“We've been pulled over a few times,” Jo grins, when he gets to the Tampax. She loves scandalising him. “But no one goes through that stuff. I think that one has the bones. Here.” She tips the box out and sorts them, tampons and bones, into little piles. “Looks like we need more raccoon penis.”

“Never let it be said your mom isn't prepared for everything,” he says, wrinkling his nose and her face falls a little. She scoops it all back into the box, eyes on her hands.

“I think she misses the roadhouse. She's just doing this because of me.”

“I think you make a good team,” he says, and she smiles, private and pleased.

“Me too.”

“Why do you do this?”

She sighs, and shrugs. She's had to answer this question a lot, he thinks, from her mom, probably Sam and Dean, other hunters at the roadhouse, who look at her, pretty and vibrant and smart, and want something else for her, who want the hard work left to old and crusty men, ground down by the job.

“I dunno, Adam. Pick one. I'm a freak. It feels good to save people. My dad did it. Why do you?”

“Same, I guess. What else am I going to do?”

She looks at him then, and frowns. She looks like her mom.

“You finished school, didn't you? You could do anything.”

“Maybe,” he says, but she can tell he doesn't mean it. He's said his goodbyes.

::

Zachariah never tracks them down, if indeed the old woman had been his spy, and he doesn't darken Adam's dreams again, returning it seems to his original hope, appearing across the country in the Impala perhaps, or their room, elbowing Sam's supplicants aside and starting in on his own threats and promises. Maybe he's offering to bring John back, or their mother, but every morning he and Jo and Ellen wake and the world is still there: a little worse for wear each day perhaps, storms threatening Chicago and unsettled ghosts spiking their violence, but still essentially whole.

And then Bobby calls.

They'd been laughing, him and Jo at least, busting a gut over a guy on the job just done that gets way too into Ellen, like he's been waiting all his life for her to come and shoot his boss and save his soul; he begs to come with them. Ellen straightens his tie and says _no thanks,_ politely, and back at the motel threatens them with a disembowlling if they don't stop re-enacting the scene. When the phone rings and she goes quiet they know, their chuckles dying, Jo's hands falling from Adam's throat. He grabs his bag and checks his knives.

Ellen drives them out of southern California, cruising up I-15, all three of them heavy of heart, picking up Castiel at a cathedral in Las Vegas, where he is hiding his prayers like a leaf in a forest. 

Bobby greets them at the door, grim and worn.

“You feel like we've been through this before?” Jo says to Adam, out the corner of her mouth. 

Adam remembers the last time, gathering to meet the Devil, thinking he knew what he had to know, thinking he was where he was supposed to be.

“We nearly bit it the last time.”

“Child's play,” she scoffs. But they'd only just made it that time, all of them watching out for each other, Dean's quick eye and hand, Bobby blocking the windows and Sam battering like granite against the roof space trapdoor at the top of that tiny ladder, Jo and Ellen laying out the fuse below. And now Sam and Dean were on their way and who knew how that would fall out, the last of Adam's family, twisted and sorry and exclusive.

::

Everyone gathers on the porch when the Impala curls into the driveway, gleaming, gravel crunching under her tyres. They get out and shake off the road dust, stretch out the cramps and Adam is kind of shocked by the difference in them, like a hundred years have been lifted from their shoulders.

They're taller than he remembered, and just as broad and bulky and roadworn, but some tectonic shift has opened them up, and Adam can feel it infect the rest of them, bleed out some measure of the tension and fear that's been tying them up. Sam and Dean are here, young and strong and beautiful, and it doesn't seem so foolish to think they might have a chance. 

Dean beams at them all when he hits the steps and it shows in his eyes so clearly: he is happy. He puts on a fake hurt when he gets to Adam, reproach for leaving so suddenly, and even that can't cover what's shining out of him. Sam's hair is longer again, huge wide white smile under bangs swooping down around his face and behind his ears, and to Adam's surprise wraps him in a hug that Adam returns in stiff-backed confusion.

“Bobby says they've been after you, too,” says Sam. 

“Not for a while,” he croaks, and Sam nods in sympathy. Up close he can tell that they are both exhausted, broken nights of sleep showing under their eyes; they've had a hard time, Dean is telling Ellen next to him, hiding from angels and devils both, and hunting down Death.

Bobby claps Sam on the shoulder and calls him son. Sam grins at him and pulls from his pocket two small rings, cradled in the palm of his hand, and Bobby laughs for the first time that day.

::

He's sharpening his knives, out on the porch, taking advantage of the noonday sun to find minute snarls and dullness on his blades, fighting to keep an even pressure on the whetstone with his hand, when Sam sits next to him.

“That was Dad's, you know.”

Adam nods and keeps his eyes on the stone. When they talk to him now, or look at him, his heart starts pounding, and crazy words spiral up in his throat, crowding and pressing and painful to swallow down.

“I think Dean said once.”

“I'm glad you have it.”

His fingers falter, rubbing on the grit of the stone. He nods, tests the edge with his thumb. Still blunt, but he's not able to continue, not with Sam sitting by insisting on this, whatever this is to be. When Adam looks at him his eyes are clear; seeing him now Adam realises how burdened he was, all those days stretching back even to the hospital. Maybe this is what he was like when he was younger, without so many sins bearing on him. Who forgave him, that he walks around now so straight-backed and free? Who allowed him to forget what he did, what they did, spinning out that elaborate joke at Adam's expense?

Sam sighs, raises an eyebrow and gives an elaborate shrug like the question is obvious.

“Why'd you go, Adam?”

“I'm surprised you care.” He can hear the sullenness in his voice and tries to strip it out. Sam frowns.

“Of course. We were really worried. If you hadn't wound up at Bobby's--”

“Dean was worried.”

“You're my brother too, Adam,” Sam says, frown deepening.

Adam laughs and hears it shard out bitterly, emerging full-formed and angry like it's coming from someone else, who didn't need to wrap himself up in acceptance and false belonging until he smothered.

“I saw what that means.”

He puts his knife down with a trembling hand and looks Sam in the eye until he gets it, blinks in shock and breathes deep, turns his face away and rubs his hand through his hair. Adam looks for it but there's no flush of blood, no shame making itself known, and his voice is quiet but steady.

“That's not anything to do with you.”

Hot tears press behind his eyes. That's the whole point. None of it was to do with him. Why did Sam even bring him along in the first place? Why let him believe? But Sam can't see him, is still talking, more faraway stories.

“You know when I was a kid – well not a kid, younger than you though. High school. I used to wish I had another brother, or a sister or, or mom or whatever. Just someone else.”

Adam shakes his head, lips pressed thin, jaw clenched. Sam doesn't need to say it. He already gets it, he gets how ancillary, how figurative he was. They've shown him plenty of times.

“Someone else to get fucked up.”

“That's how you know you're a Winchester,” Sam says, fatalism tossed off so flippantly; Adam finds himself on his feet, overtaken and shaking with fury, gasping breath, his face burning, jabbing his finger at Sam and spilling it all, black and rotten and true.

“I'm a Milligan,” he hisses, feeling his lips stretch, his teeth bare. “You can keep your Winchester. I don't want it. And you can keep each other, like you always have, and you can keep your fucking dad. The only thing he ever did for me was get my mom killed. And the only thing you ever did was lie to me. So whatever. I guess if you can sleep with a demon you can sleep with your brother. No wonder Lucifer wants you.”

He spits these last words and feels a brief thrill of victory at the dismay washing across on Sam's face, the hurt in his eyes, and then, purged, regrets it instantly. His knees give out and he sits back down, his strings cut, legs trembling like he's run a marathon. He keeps his eyes on the ground, listening to himself breathe, feeling his pulse stutter. Sam leans forward and puts his face in his hands, rubs at his forehead and eyes, his hair falling forward, before leaning back and clapping his hands on his thighs, looking at Adam, caustic and open.

“I know I've fucked up, Adam. Believe me I know. Everyone I meet--” He laughs bleakly, and doesn't finish the sentence. “I'm sorry I didn't just let you get on with your life.”

Adam sighs, shakes his head.

“I had no life to get on with.”

“He's the only thing I've ever had,” Sam says, like he didn't even hear Adam, grimacing around the words as though they're painful. “I don't expect you to get it, or be happy about it, or whatever. And I know I don't deserve it. But it's the only thing I've got, and I'm gonna take it,” and he stands and walks away without looking back, leaving Adam depleted and numb, watching as Dean comes out of the house into the shining sun, grinning wide, yelling something about goofer dust. He tosses the keys to Sam, who grabs them out of the air with one hand and grabs the back of Dean's neck with the other and shakes it a little, fondness like a wave between them, and they fool about like this as they get into the car and drive away.

“Fucking hell, you asshole, I'm not gonna wash all your goddamn jeans by myself,” Jo yells, down the length of the porch, head and shoulders stuck out of the kitchen window. “Get your ass in here.”

“Yessir,” he says, giving a mocking salute as she glares at him and backs inside, barking off pained curse as she bangs her head on the window hard enough to rattle the glass. He swallows a laugh, wincing in sympathy, and stands, joints creaking, and heads in to help her.

::

They arrive before midnight to prepare the ground, bent over in the Impala's headlights. It only takes half an hour with Sam and Bobby directing them, and Adam helps Dean stash the gear back in the car afterwards. Dean slams the trunk and stands at his shoulder, a soft, pleased smile on this face that somehow includes Adam at his side and the car in front, sinking like ink into the night, her edges lit up.

“She's a sight, ain't she?” He says, stroking along the curve of the rear panel, patting the roof. “She's my baby.”

He thought he'd never have to see this car again, so solid and gleaming, her backseat full of ghosts. When he first saw her, when he'd first driven her, he'd thought she looked so unbalanced, sitting so far back on her wheels, that long slim trunk leaning out into space, too precarious to hold anyone safely, to do what was demanded of her. But she had, unflinchingly.

“Hey, dreamer,” Dean says, bumping him with his elbow. “You gonna be okay?”

“Good question,” Adam says, and Dean grins at him.

“Yeah, that's how it always goes,” he says easily, as the rest of them start washing up against the car as well, Ellen and Jo, and Sam, and Bobby and Cas, Dean turning his gaze on each of them with an odd deep contentment, here at the end of the world.

“I'm not gonna lie to you guys,” Sam says quietly. “This is our final play. You all don't need to be here.”

“Don't be an idiot, Sam,” Jo says, helping Ellen force on a pair of too-small gloves, Ellen's eyes on her face, shining.

“I have no where else to be,” says Cas. 

“Can't risk you chuckleheads dropping the ball in the last quarter,” Bobby says, gruff and tight; he watches Sam and Dean, and Adam can see him thinking, the thought also in his mind, that this cannot be all they were born to: orphans, to be used without care or concern for the lives they've clutched at through the darkness; and they linger there together in the dim ambient light of the headlights for the rest of the night, the moon turning above them, hauling up the dawn.

::

Zachariah arrives early, just as the air begins to grey, but they expected that and are ready for him, Sam and Dean standing apart from the rest of them, inside a half-hidden Devil's trap. Zachariah looks at it scornfully and sniffs the air, stepping delicately around the lines of holy oil.

“Well Dean, do you have a yes for me?”

“You want my answer, you wait,” Dean says, and hunches down into his jacket, hands shoved deep in his pockets. Zachariah rolls his eyes.

“You people are so predictable. I am an Angel of the Lord, Dean. I can feel him coming. Even if he destroys me, I will be replaced, and we will ask you again.” He spreads his arms wide. “Welcome to the inevitable.”

Lucifer comes with the dawn, walking along the eastbound road, the sun behind him like a halo pushing him forwards. 

“This is it, children,” Zachariah says, eyeing him as he shambles through the little picket gate. He looks like a zombie, sores from Carthage ravaged into open wounds now, and he ignores Zachariah completely, gaze constant on Sam, drawing near and making their eyes water with the sharp sulphurous stink of his rotting body, his rotten soul.

“Sam,” he says. “I have given you all the patience in my grasp. Take pity.”

“No,” says Sam, deep and firm, and Adam quails, unready for it to begin so unceremoniously. “No, I won't. Do you hear me? Never.”

“You heard the kid,” Bobby says. “So give it up, the pair of you.”

“You cannot give up what is ordained,” Zachariah spits. He brings up his hand like a gun, finger barrel pointed at Bobby's heart, sliding on over Castiel, Adam, Jo, Ellen.

“You goddamn bully,” Adam says, voice shaking. “Welcome to free will.”

“No,” says Dean, and throws them a reckless, carefree grin. “That's it. You can go home now.”

“You filth,” Zachariah says, wonder in his tone, and the land and sky begin to shake with a burning white light, like a convent once shook in Maryland. Lucifer darts a look up and steps fast towards Sam, hand outstretched, and Sam and Dean stumble back to avoid him, grabbing at each other to keep their feet.

_Bvtmon Tabges Babalon_ , whispers Ellen, and the ground disintegrates under Lucifer and he falls into his cage, surprise taking over his face, arms flailing, and his howl of rage is taken up by Zachariah, who flings himself at Sam and Dean like Michael is carrying him through the air, Michael who is arriving in a fury of light and sound so huge it feels like the world is trying to burn itself up, the two angels bearing down on Sam and Dean standing broad-shouldered together, shrinking black silhouettes.

And then they are gone.

 

**Part 5. Rolling on into the sunset.**

They're all blind, a whole scrambling minute of hoarse white desperation until Castiel returns their sight. Adam blinks at the touch to his temple and sees Castiel's sombre face.

His knees give out and he falls heavily to the ground, winded, and clammy and cold with panicked sweat. The world is dim and grey after Castiel's touch, Jo and Ellen in front of him seeming to clutch at each other through a fog, and he realises Jo is crying, heaving great shocked sobs into her mother's chest, the sound fading in so gradually that he must have been deaf as well. He touches his ear and his fingers come away bloody.

In his pocket are the keys to the Impala.

Jo drives it to Bobby's house and there it stays.

::

It's three in the morning. They're half into their cups by the time he gets the courage to ask, and even then it's Jo who has the real courage.

“Are they in Heaven?”

Castiel has been drinking with them, keeping up and then some because he doesn't have to wince after every cheap shot of whiskey, and finally looks drunk trying to figure out how to answer the question.

“Maybe.”

“What in Hell does that mean?” Ellen demands.

Castiel looks at her, lost.

“I can't tell if they are in Heaven.”

“They're not in Hell,” says Adam, flatly, like it could be written down as true.

“I can't confirm that.”

“Well where are they then?” says Jo.

“Do you think if I knew I would be here?” Castiel snaps, and Adam wants to insist on an answer and is terrified by the thought, terrified by the open ugly loss on Castiel's face; Castiel who fell for Dean, who had believed in him, who had saved them so many times. The grass had been burned in a perfectly neat six-foot circle, and he had seen no blood, heard no screams. When they had returned to Bobby's they tried the TV, gobsmacked news anchors with resumed peace talks, weathermen shrugging at the evaporation of tornadoes. They tried summoning spells, and scrying spells, and called one of Bobby's psychic friends, and poured their blood into bowls, and onto maps, and used the last of Bobby's stock of wizened and gross teratomas, and found nothing.

“There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio,” says Bobby, and knocks his last one back with a cracked and mordant laugh.

::

It's all he can do to get up in the mornings, lying late into the night thinking on all that's gone, how far his life has spun out that he could lose his whole family, and then lose it again. Three days in he tries to drink himself to sleep, drunker than he's ever been, gathered with the others around some bottles and memories and he thinks it'll work but the second he gets to a bed it backfires on him, takes him screeching right back to the first months after his mom was killed, an eternity of his brain picking over her final moments, their nails and teeth. They'd been saving him for later, but they hadn't let up on her, and she'd screamed, throat-rending, scared and angry. She'd known he was taken; she'd seen him down there, her mouth stretched open in dismay at the sight of him. Had she still known at the end? Had she known he survived? She would have gone easier, he thinks, knowing that. It might have hurt her less.

And Sam and Dean, his brothers, her sons almost, they had taken her and tried to help her and now they were gone themselves, disappeared, burned up maybe or fallen to Hell or trapped somewhere under the bright angry eye of God or His angels. Hurting, probably; looking back it seems like maybe that's all they ever really did.

::

Bobby has them doing busy-work, cataloguing books that are too frail really to handle, cleaning old trinkets brought up in boxes from the basement with toothbrush and polish, uncovering scripts and symbols and twisted faces. The wrong breath at the wrong time, he thinks, and he'll turn himself into gold, or blow off his other arm. In the stories that's always the cost of power.

It bores the hell out of Jo but she seems to prefer it that way, sitting across from him with a grumpy frown, opening a bottle of Brasso, nostrils flaring at the scent. She has been bringing him coffee in bed when the mornings starts to tip over towards noon, strong and black, sitting on his legs if he doesn't tuck them away fast enough, hair hanging in loose waves. Ellen and Jo have the same ash-gold tint to their hair, like the wheat stubble in Idaho that Sam had run his hand through and laughed in memory of some childhood tumble. 

Adam shakes his head. His thoughts always fall this way now, wonder like a pain in his gut, questions that will never be answered: how many of their memories included him by the end? What percentage of them did he make up? 

“This is a disaster,” he sighs, rubbing his thumb along the spine of a book handbound in red leather. Keep an eye out for the word _melech_ , Bobby had said, or the tetragrammaton, and he finds the former here in flaky gold leaf, maybe two hundred years old, still persisting. Inside the text is Hebrew and handwritten in hard angry letters pushed deep into the page.

“This world is a disaster, bucko. Whaddaya gonna do about it?”

“I honestly don't know, Jo.” His throat knots, thick and painful.

“Don't cry, asshole,” she says, and turns her face up, eyes shining. He puts the book in the _show Bobby_ pile and she tosses her head like a colt and makes a note in the repurposed _1984 Women's Health Diary_ Bobby had dumped them with this morning. 

“You still want to be a hunter?” She asks, after a while.

“I guess so,” Adam says. He hasn't really thought about it. He'd said he was a Milligan, to Sam, but there's Winchester in there too; that's how he's been travelling, all these months, and somewhere along the way he figured that counted as a profession.

::

After a week he realises he's waiting for Ellen and Jo to leave him but they stay on at Bobby's until even he can tell that Bobby is going crazy having so many people in his house.

“You said once I could stay on,” he says to Bobby, mumbling it to the book he's reading, half-hoping it soaks them up into its pages. Outside, Jo and Ellen grumble over the bonnet of Ellen's wagon. It makes him itchy to think of them delaying for him, hanging around out of unwanted pity when they should be moving. Hunters are supposed to be restless, searching.

“Kid,” Bobby sighs, down at his own book, and Adam flushes, the rejection yawing surprisingly deep. “I'll be honest with you. I ain't gonna be much good for you.” 

“I don't want to be any trouble.” He risks a glance up and Bobby shrugs, face sagging grey under his cap.

“Do what you're gonna do, Adam.”

What he does is put the book down and slip invisible back through the house to the room he counts as his but very well could once have been Sam's, or his father's. His duffel is still packed, sitting neatly by the bed. His shirts and jeans and boxers inside are rolled tightly, short and thick, a one-handed adaptation of what he saw Dean doing that first morning out of Windom.

At dinner, around the kitchen table, he says to them to go on, that he's feeling sick and maybe will catch up with them down the road. Bobby is stirring a jar of pasta sauce on the stove and doesn't seem to hear Ellen stand, chair scraping back as she leans forward with her fists on the table. She looks down at him, forbidding and stern, but her chin trembles and her voice shakes in a minor key.

“I've seen a lot in this life, Adam, too goddamn much, and I've lost too many goddamn people to let you pine away on a Motel 6 bed in some kind of sacrificial guilt trip. I'm gonna have that car running right by Monday morning and so help me if you're not in it I'll kick your ass from here to Hell and back. Are we clear?”

Two days.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I warned you about that,” she says, and turns to clatter pots on the stove, reaching around Bobby for the pasta, reaching briefly up to rub at her hidden face. He looks at Jo and she nods, and covers his hand with her own.

::

“I think maybe Sam and Dean were,” he offers up to Bobby on Sunday night, sharing beer on the porch with the Impala standing firm before them under a shattering downpour, and then can't go any further on a sentence he's been trying vainly to finish in his head for days now. Bobby grunts, doesn't give him anything he can run with.

He's been thinking on that night he saw them in the car, wondering on Zachariah's duplicity. Maybe he hadn't seen what he'd thought he saw, maybe it had been twisted into something terrible. If he'd stopped, tried to talk to them, maybe things would have ended differently. 

But then Sam had as much as admitted it, and they'd been so happy, rocking up to Bobby's, or if not happy then at peace, at least. Ellen had seen it too, said something about irony, and Jo had stared puzzled at them more than once, as they jostled and drank and called each other out on minutia in deep-running glee, some rent connective tissue reknit. That had happened without Adam. 

Whatever it was, he had been part of something, and that part had left him. And he had left it, too, stormed away in heart-thumping fury, injustice and neglect and ill-use roaring in his ears. Now black clouds and thunder throw rain down in fat drops that hit puddles hard enough to splash up and dampen his boots, and he takes another beer from the selection by his heel and decides that he probably wouldn't care so much if they were here right now, Sam and Bobby arguing arcana, Dean bragging to Adam about the wax job on his car, the way the lightning hallows her sleek lines. 

“Kid?” prompts Bobby, and Adam starts, shakes his head. 

John to Dean to Adam, the last Winchester, the sum of his inheritance, the car that his father had taught him to drive, knowing it was marked for another.

::

They leave Bobby behind, or he leaves them, Adam can't quite get the vectors right in his head, back in Ellen's wagon with the land slipping by him and under him and the sky rolling over, endless and empty. Driving through town they pass the remains of the _South Dakota_ , and he wonders how many times Sam and Dean drove out past it, always returning until they didn't. So many roads he will roll over now, never knowing if they drove there first, always preceding him.

Jo and Ellen mean well, silent in their own thoughts and within arm's reach. But his mother, Sam and Dean who were supposed to be his brothers; they were supposed to be here. Who has a stake in his soul now, him forgotten and bloodless in the world?

::

“My dad died you know.”

They're canvassing license plates outside a Mall of America, looking for a conspicuous MAD LUV on the back of an inconspicuous white Honda. It's hot under the shadeless sun, and sweat runs between Adam's shoulders, down his chest. Stuff this, they should just get inside into the air conditioning and go shopping, find him a lighter summer shirt. He wipes at his forehead, cursing Ellen who won the underground garage. 

“Yeah, your mom told me.” It had something to do with John Winchester, but he never quite got the full story.

“They always get us in the end." Her hair is pressed down damp and dark with sweat. She says it matter-of-fact. “Where do you think they went?”

Some days he thinks, probably someplace bad. Seems like Castiel is the only nice angel left, and maybe even he wouldn't give incest and demon-blood drinking a heavenly reward. Today is a day when he believes that their ledgers run too far into the black for anything so unforgiving. 

“Maybe they got reborn,” he says. “Little babies in a hospital somewhere, crying their brains out.”

Jo huffs a surprised laugh, white teeth perfect in the sun.

“I like that,” she says. “Give 'em hell, boys.”

::

His stump is doing well, he thinks, the skin a little dry these days maybe but the muscle is good and the arm useable, no pain at the site or deeper and his cramps lesser and irregular, especially when he's rested and healthy, tracking with what he's been able to find on the net and the occasional leaf through PubMed, mouth going dry at the stories of bone spurs and rot and infection he finds there. He had coasted through the worst of it, he realises, never understanding how lucky he was to miss a second round of surgeries or a poorly-attached muscle. His mind had been elsewhere, and in the meantime, Sam had brought his arm back to life.

Ellen asks him one day if he wants to get a prosthetic, and he shies away from the question, slightly ashamed to realise that he doesn't, really, not enough to go through getting one fit and the problems when the cheap-ass one he can afford fits wrong, and who the hell he'd see about that anyway, driving around the country like a freakshow. And his stump works. It holds open doors for him, and turns pages, and thumps people on the back just fine, and for what it can't do he's got his left, and his sharpened fork, and his elastic-sided boots.

“Above-elbow prosthetics are a special level of pain in the ass,” he says, and Jo goes _oh remember_ and she and Ellen tumble over each other to tell the story of the woman, a scrawny grandmother type, who spent a summer drinking at the roadhouse, tossing back shots held between the pincers of her hook, how she'd take it off as she got deeper into the night and use it to point at any other hunters who happened to have lasted as long as her, berating them for their poor life choices and worse personal hygiene. 

“You would have loved her,” Jo says, projecting. Adam rolls his eyes.

“Oh yeah, she sounds like a laugh riot.”

“Shut up. Rumour was she lost it to a revenant. I dunno, it always sounded fishy.”

“I'll ask her at the next meeting,” he says, and they each give him the finger, side by side, in unison.

::

He likes to see the corn waving outside the window in Iowa, young and green and waist-high, tipped in brown. It makes him think of people moving across plains for thousands of years, travelling with him. Jo hates Iowa, says it's like staring at a blade of grass for five hours, which makes him laugh, takes him back to Rupanada's tirades against monoculture.

He was an only child; Gary had been the closest to a brother he'd had but he and his mom had usually been happy doing their thing, John peeping in the window occasionally over the last few years. Then all of a sudden no mom, no dad, and two brothers, who were, in the end, not even for him. 

Jo and Ellen are also alone, but they are not burdened in the same way as Sam and Dean. They carry their losses lighter and their love less dreadfully and their home is warmer, and imminent. It could be, he dreams sometimes, as he verges on waking and his cautious self is still offline, a place soft enough to accommodate him in his ruin.

::

They seem to curve around in a narrowing loop and end up again quite accidentally at Bobby's. A month in, and Bobby has not been taking it well, and seems faintly embarrassed to welcome them in, faintly surprised by the layer of dust in his own house and the pyramid of empty Jim Beams out back. Ellen looks around without a trace of sympathy, mutters something under her breath and starts cracking windows, chasing out the brushed-butter scent of sage, and lonely man, something parched and sour underlying.

Adam would suffocate if he had to live here, the rooms all the same, furniture the same, the same rugs walked on and doorways bushed past, probably the same tins of long-life milk in the cupboard that had been picked up and put down dubiously, all of them bearing traces of people gone, their footprints and yearnings and being. If you taste that, he thinks, you wouldn't be able to let it go. You would drown in it.

That night Adam overhears Ellen and Bobby, at their usual place in the kitchen, over their usual drinks. An hour ago Jo finally found the atmosphere too oppressive and drove into town with a _fuck all y'all_ flying over her shoulder; _what's going to be open on a Sunday?_ Adam had asked, and she'd shot him a look like he still had a lot to learn about drinking. Adam was too tired to go out, retired to his bed with his portable DVD player and _Jurassic Park_. He stands now barefoot in the hallway in the dark, having slunk downstairs for an actual glass of milk, listening now to mom and dad talk about Santa, missing only a teddy clutched in one hand.

“You should come on the road with us,” Ellen says.

“You don't want an old man tagging along,” Bobby says. He sounds more changed when Adam can't see him, voice wearied and whiskeyed, hollowed out.

“You lasted ten years without those boys when John Winchester was off being an asshole, remember.”

“I wasn't half in the grave back then. And them all in the grave.”

“You don't know that.”

“You don't not know it.”

There's a long pause and he holds his breath, clock ticking forward loudly as she hisses, “Bobby, goddammit, I saw those books. You put that shit away. I'll only say it once.”

Ellen lets it sit for a minute and when she starts again it's on a different tack.

“Are you just gonna sit here and drink yourself to death? We still need you, ya coot.”

“I'll do what I want,” he says, truculent, and when she sighs Adam can't handle the sorrow of it, turning and tiptoeing back upstairs.

The next morning he's first awake except for Bobby at the kitchen table, who maybe hasn't even moved at all; the bags under his eyes, the grizzle, the sag, it's all permanent these days.

“I wasn't going to do anything,” Bobby says. “I'm not a moron.”

Adam's looking for coffee and he startles, glances at Bobby guiltily.

“Yeah, I knew you were there, Bigfoot. I'm not that far gone.”

“ _Adonai Melech_?” he asks, and gets a ghost of a smile from Bobby.

“That's the one.”

He loses himself a while in the morning ritual, fixing up a couple of fresh coffees, handing over a mug to Bobby. The smell of it brightens the room and the clouds outside seem to back off a little.

“When my wife died,” Bobby says after an age, “I burned her remains on a pyre out back.”

“It's worse when you can't say goodbye,” Adam surprises himself by saying. “It's like there's always a part of you left back there.”

Bobby nods, eyes on the table, but Adam is on a roll now, hand clenched around his mug, words spilling out.

“In the hospital they'd kept saying have faith. Not even religious faith. Just have it. Like you can buy it. But trust is something children have. When your mom dies you stop being a child. How can people expect that of you?”

Bobby looks at him.

“It takes time, Adam.”

Adam nods, wipes angrily at his eyes, finishes his coffee, sick of it, how it always comes back, always waiting for him, tangled up with everything else.

“You want me to fix up the car?” Bobby asks. Adam frowns.

“What's wrong with it?”

“Nothing, but I can put some mods in, make it easier to drive one-handed. It wouldn't be hard.” Bobby shrugs, avoiding his eyes.

“Oh. Thanks, Bobby. Not, not just now though.”

“No one else is gonna drive it, Adam,” Bobby says, but when they leave it's still there, shifted into the garage and out of the weather.

::

Jo is crying one morning, sitting on the motel bed watching PBS, when he walks out of the bathroom, brushing his teeth.

“I'm sorry,” she says, automatically, and wipes her face.

“Why?”

She shrugs, eyes shining, fixed on the tv. Back in the bathroom he rinses and spits and looks at himself in the mirror. 

He sits with her, watching until Mr Rogers puts on his cardigan and leaves. He wants to call out for him not to go, needs more of his words, his forgiveness.

“It's not like I knew them very well,” Jo says. “I feel like I'm moving into your house or something.”

“You knew them before me.”

“It's just, them, out of everyone. I thought Dean would be hitting on me 'til I was gone myself.”

He puts his arm across her shoulder and they lean into each other, staring down at the threadbare motel carpet, faded orange-brown, the cousin of the first motel carpet he saw with Sam and Dean, and so many since then. 

“Sometimes I forget how many people I know who have died,” she says voice thick, the words underneath echoing on: _don't die, don't go_.

“I won't if you won't,” he says.

::

Castiel drops by every other day and hangs around mournfully, never settling.

“Is everything okay?” Adam asks, heart returning to normal speed, forever unused to such unnatural travel. Even the Impala is preferable to that.

“I am okay,” Castiel says, mouthing awkwardly around the word, and Adam and Ellen trade amused looks. “But without access to Heaven's power I am obliged to check on you personally.”

He is still standing just inside the door, having caught them in the middle of their morning wake-up, Jo halfway into yesterday's jeans, Adam rubbing moisturiser into his stump, Ellen on her hands and knees, looking for her boots under the bed.

“Just say you're lonely,” says Jo, crossly.

“I am lonely,” he says, downcast and she blushes, sheepish.

“You wanna ride with us?” Ellen says. 

“Perhaps I will,” he says, and spends three days sitting stiffly in the back seat with Adam, and in diner booths, and in creaky motel chairs while they sleep, which would be creepy except that he seems to banish any nightmares Adam has, and even those foreboding low-level background dreams, where he can never find his mom. They're not on a job at the moment, enjoying easy trips along the Arkansas River, hiking up Mount Nebo with Castiel in his full accountant outfit, confused as to the point of it all even when they get to the lookout with its great eternal landscape, miles of trees dotted with fields, clouds low over all, turning the lake a steely grey.

“Can you work for Heaven again?” Ellen asks that night over their microwaved instant dinners, stir fry for her and chicken burgers for Adam and Jo. 

“Even were they to allow me, it would not be my choice.”

“You're doing fine here,” Jo says, and pats him on the arm. He looks at her burger with barely-concealed nausea, and then nods firmly.

“Yes,” he says. “I will be a hunter.” 

“.......Okay,” says Jo. “We can do that.”

They still can't find a job, and stop in Oaklahoma City to make Castiel a few fake IDs, Paul Hewson the FBI stooge and Maurice Mickelwhite the intrepid PI. They fail to convince him that he needs a new suit, and show him how records are kept, enduring his comments about the paucity and brevity of human existence.

“I have found a case,” he tells them, at five in the morning, shaking them awake, ignoring the gun Ellen pulls instinctively out from under her pillow. “I'll meet you there,” and disappears, and it takes them six hours before they get him to answer his phone, and by that time the ghost is salted and burned and he has found a new case to test himself on.

::

They're kicking their feet under a laudromat table, steaming slightly from the Seattle rain outside. Ellen's off getting dinner, and strands of Jo's hair are escaping, curling up erratically around her face in the oppressive dryer humidity and stench of fabric softener.

“Why don't you have anything from before?” She asks him, eyes carefully ahead.

“And keep it where?”

All he has left from before is the memorial card, which is hardly from before, a knife or two, some shirts, and a car which isn't really his. 

“You didn't keep anything of your mom's?”

He shrugs. He can't carry that stuff around with him. It's too much, and it's not even the real weight. 

“After the estate was liquidised mostly everything went to Goodwill.”

“Oh. Listen,” Jo says, hesitantly. “Sam gave me this to give to you. In case they didn't come back.”

She hands over a bracelet, big white pearls warm from her hand. He knows it, and he half-laughs in shock, never imagining he'd see it again: a piece of her jewellery, an old one from when he was about six and Mr Small Business Tycoon who was on the scene thought he was in with a long-term chance. Sam must have seen it hidden in the pouch in her jewellery box, figured it as special when he was boxing up the house. 

“Why didn't he give it to me?”

“I dunno, why did that guy do anything?”

Adam shrugs. Most of what Sam did turned out to be about the same thing, in the end. 

“She kind of hated this thing.”

Her face falls.

“This guy Gerald gave it to her for Valentines Day, she thought he was so cheesy.” He brings it up to his mouth and bites the pearls, his teeth sliding over the surface, like they did fifteen years ago. He hands it over to her and she does the same, lips curled back. 

“Can you feel how smooth it is? That's how you know it's not real. Real pearls are kinda gritty, a little bit.”

“Oh. Well, that's good to know,” she says, doubtfully.

He laughs, and takes it back from her. They can put it in their dress-up box, next to Jo's engagement rings, and Adam's stolen press pass, and Ellen's sensible FBI-boss clip-on earrings.

::

Castiel keeps a mobile phone, and always manages to rerecord his own outgoing voicemail message with interstitial nonsense, like _behind the ninety-third parallel_ and _what is a butt dial_. They return his call for help once and get a full minute of static and hyena laughs, a manic empty noise that dominate Adam's dreams for the three nights it takes to get to him, replacing soundtrack and dialogue both, hazing across prairieland and into darkwood hallways, stretching his mother's jaw out grotesquely.

They track him down through his GPS, and when they find him he is fine, in the middle of an investigation into dead household pets, travelling with another neophyte hunter named Garth, who looks more like a scarecrow than anything else. 

“What the hell, Cas,” says Ellen. “We were worried.” Ellen does worry about them, Adam has come to see; she worried about his brothers, and Adam, and still calls Bobby once a week, concern reaching out always to their lonely round-bound kin.

“You don't need to worry about that,” Cas says. “That's next year.” 

After half an hour in their company Jo turns to him and says, “This is a buddy comedy,” bewildered. 

“One is a taciturn fish out of water. The other is a dentist. Together they fight crime!”

And pretty ineffectively, it would seem. All signs point to some kind of slighted house-elf but Garth won't believe it. 

“And you're basing this on?” Ellen says.

“Wishes,” says Castiel.

“A _feeling_ ,” says Garth, shooting Castiel a dark look. 

“You need more than feelings in this job,” says Jo, and Garth nods his head wisely, like they're on the same page.

“This won't end well,” Ellen says, watching them head into the ME's office together. Adam can see Castiel's hand flexing, down by his side, like he's practicing flipping open an ID wallet.

“Mom,” Jo groans, “give them a chance. We were all young once.”

“You're gonna be young forever,” Ellen says, smiling at her, and Jo squirms under it, not knowing whether to revel in her love or complain for her independence. She won't be though, of course, and Adam can see Ellen already regretting it. Age correlates to a few things, the least important of which is years. The point is that it happens to you without your permission.

Cas and Garth pick up a pretty solid lead in the ME's office, and because the three of them don't really feel like picking through bits of Cinnamon the Poodle for clues they make their excuses and back away as quickly as possible.

“You two look after each other, you hear?” Ellen says, hanging over the car door, eyebrows raised. “Go visit Bobby every now and then, god knows you could use the training.”

::

In Los Molinos he kills his first werewolf with a clean shot to the heart after Jo runs it right to him. Three months ago it had been a plumber and then last week it killed six kids out getting drunk under the rail bridge, dumping their bodies in the river to wash downstream. Rolling into town they had been stonewalled by all and sundry, until Ellen had looked over the papers and pointed to his face. Her instincts are incredible.

Once again Jo's the only one nimble enough for the run, and Ellen is not happy about it. She takes Jo's heavy gear and crouches down next to Adam, checks her gun again. They are waiting in a field out past the high school, drove the wagon right up on to it to provide some cover. The space is wide and open enough that the thing can't creep up on them, that Jo can find them easy, but the ground isn't as smooth underfoot as he would have liked. He can't imagine having to run full tilt over it, irregular tufts ready to trip you up and a monster on your heels.

“You're gonna wait 'til it gets level with that tree now.”

“Yes.”

“You're gonna breathe and take a clean shot. You're not gonna shoot my daughter, and you're not gonna let it get us.”

“Yup.”

She nods at him, and they wait in the dark, earthy smell rising out of the ground, some kid's army man sitting discarded by the wheel. Adam checks their exit every two minutes, certain that he'll see glowing eyes moving up on them. They wait, and wait.

“What if something's wrong?” he whispers, fear gnawing at his gut, breaking him out in a cold sweat.

“Nothing's wrong.”

“But how do you know?”

“If something happens to her I'll be there and it'll happen to me too.”

“What if you're not?”

“You think I don't think about that, Adam?” she snaps. “When something like that happens, you find out pretty soon whether you can live with it or not. Now shut up and get ready.”

After, after it slides to a rest six feet from their outstretched guns and he realises she never even took a shot, Jo throwing herself panting to the ground, she grins wide and wraps him in a close hug. He can smell her shampoo, faintly floral. 

“Sorry,” he mutters into her shoulder, and she squeezes him and lets go, thumping him on the back, still smiling. 

“Welcome to the club.”

::

One afternoon outside of Barstow they stop to refill the radiator and he walks twenty yards off the road, feeling like he's on Mars. It's his first real time in the Mojave; he's used to forests and fields, mountains. This is alien territory, stripped clean of encumbrance. Sand shifts over the ground in the mild breeze, rolling on until it fetches up against straggly scrub. Windward, some speck of rock is ground out to begin it all again.

His mom had mentioned once or twice wanting to take him to San Diego to meet some distant cousin; he wonders if she's ever driven down this road. For some reason he finds it easier to think of her out here; he pictures a scarf in her hair; aviators over her eyes, rolling on into the sunset, himself at the front door in Windom, having kissed her goodbye and waved her away. 

He'd loved her, and she'd known it. That counted for something.

::

“I hate close spaces,” Jo says, hunched with him under the floor of a moth eaten shack, wiping sweat off and dirt on to her brow. “Fuck this to hell.”

“Being underground,” Adam agrees.

“More like being cramped. I got caught once, by a ghost. It locked me in a box, my legs just went dead. It was...”

He pauses in his digging, the third exploratory hole in an hour, three feet to the left of the last, muck and dust overwhelming. She's been taken back, he can see, her mouth drawn downward.

“It was so scary. I was on a hunt with Dean, he found me, got me out of there.”

She finishes up abruptly and turns back to digging her own hole so he can't see the tears shining in the lantern light, harsh battery-fed yellow.

“I thought I could do it by myself. He was the first one who really took me seriously, you know, as a hunter. I don't know, he probably didn't. But he let me think he did.”

“When I got hurt, and my mom,” Adam says. “You know. Everything was so empty. I remember Sam, the first time I met him, he gave me a choice. Did I want to know.”

She looks at him.

“It feels like a million years ago.”

Her mouth twists and she nods.

“So will this, soon.”

::

Now and then, coming out of Bobby's or being chased out of Wausau by the town sheriff, they pass by Minnesota, lop off a corner here or there, and the proximity makes his gut churn in general unease. What had he thought would lie ahead of him? It seems greyed out now, someone else's half-held dreams, their uncommitted study. For the last year he's called no place home except if it has four wheels; he's studied harder than he ever thought, read until his eyes were dry and more. Is this really the shape of his future, amorphous and vague? Driving so close to his old home he feels he could take off his sunglasses and switch to the world familiar, in a tall house with dark floorboards and his mom downstairs cooking him dinner as he readies his bag for the new semester.

In October they drive right on through Windom to get to a ghost in Alexandria, Ellen checking in with him that it's okay. He nods at her and feels a chill, pulls his jacket over himself like a blanket and scrunches down, petrified of being recognised. Drawing close, semi-familiar road signs and place names take on a strange cast, as though he's only ever seen them in brochures. He tries to imagine taking the Impala back down those strange streets, growling it into his old driveway or pulling in to the hospital parking lot, Gary's house. _This is my car,_ he imagines saying. _My brothers left it to me. These are my friends._

He might not be Adam Winchester but he's not Adam Milligan anymore, not that boy, and it's pointless to hide. They would never recognise him now.

::

Driving through Abilene, Ellen spies a billboard and hangs a wide u-turn on the narrow highway, sprawling up onto the gravel. They end up at a drive-in, dusty asphalt and a wide old screen with a prominent wrinkle sitting top left. When they see what's playing Jo groans, loud and dramatic.

“Mom, just get over your Statham thing already, it's creepy.”

“Yeah,” says Adam. “He's too old for you.”

Jo turns in the front seat and punches him in the shoulder. Ellen laughs.

“Just for that, Adam, I'll get you chocolate. See how it pays to be polite to your mother?”

Adam fiddles with the radio while they head off for snacks, manages to delete half of Ellen's presets. None of them can be fucked emptying the trunk or digging out blankets to throw over the hood so they stay in the car, Adam shifting into the middle of the back seat, screen cut off on either side by Ellen and Jo. 

The first feature is an awful slasher flick, girls looking like Jo screaming and running and getting stabbed in their underwear, guys that might have looked like him once falling onto pitchforks and drowning in moonlit lakes. Jo is scornful of them all and Ellen clips out advice to them all between fistfuls of popcorn. It's the first movie he's seen at the movies since his old life died, and he's surprised by how unreal it all seems now, blood splashing and spouting with improbable vigour, and too dark, way too dark. It makes him feel a little queasy and he's glad when it's over, the final jump scare of the reanimated killer falling onto the final couple fading to black.

He falls asleep halfway through the Statham movie, which is thankfully utterly ridiculous, lulled with a belly full of salty snacks and Jo and Ellen muttering up front, one mocking Statham's one expression and the other telling her to shut her uneducated face. His mom had hated drive-ins, the one in Luverne too far, pointless when there was the State Theatre ten minutes down the road, ancient and elegant, and home to hours upon hours of his youth and teenage years, but he's never going to visit the State Theatre again, and all things considered this is a pretty acceptable substitute.

::

He's an old man so shrivelled and dried it's amazing he has any tears left at all, but he weeps them all the same, and unashamed, his daughter dead at eight years old, fifty-three years ago; more absence than presence by now. That's a presence of its own though, Adam thinks, watching the man clutch his photograph, built up in layers around her memory until the inside crumbles away like a fossilised bone, and it's strong, and more real than a lot of things in this house.

“They always said I was crazy,” the man says. “That bitch, she never believed me. Married for forty years. But I know what I saw.”

“You were right,” says Ellen, and he thanks her again, long spidery fingers weaving between her own in supplication. 

Jo doesn't like it, doesn't like the old-person smell of the place. It's been a long night breaching into a long morning and she'd wanted to go straight back to the motel, but Adam had insisted they return and tell this man they killed his daughter's murderer, if you can call it killing to destroy something so insensate, so singular and driven; other fathers will feel this grief, and it will be no less terrible and no more rational, but it will not be from this monster. That, at least, they can do.

::

They run into a soapbox preacher standing firm and loud under a tree halfway down Main Street, Nowheresville. The tree is concrete and metal, a statue with a plaque at the bottom that Adam can't read, and it reaches up twice as tall as the man, elegant and sweetly made. The preacher is similarly neat, plain-clothes buttondown, a clean-shaven white man with a bible and an audience of three wisecracking teenagers. As they pass him, he cries out.

“He is amongst us, sinners! Repent!” 

Jo rolls her eyes and Adam grins at her absently, mind running ahead of him to the library, itch in the back of his head still wary of being recognised by these godly men, with Zachariah still unaccounted for.

“You, girl! Sinner! Hell awaits you!”

He is pointing at Jo, and she stops and turns on a dime. 

“Are you serious?”

“You will burn in agony, and in burning you will know that God is just and that we all must reap what we sow. Unless you come to him now.” He reaches out for Jo's hand, and she pulls back like his touch will scald her, disbelieving, fury freezing her face.

“Time to move on, preacher,” Ellen says, in a voice that Adam has seen cower police sergeants, and he steps forward and puts his hand in his back pocket where his butterfly knife lives.

And then Jo laughs at him, high and free, and shakes her head, grinning. 

“Some of my best friends have been to Hell,” she says. “They said it was delightful.”

::

A sudden right turn takes them east and they end up squatting for a week in a half-renovated holiday home in Corova Beach, the last in a chain straggling down the Carolina coast. They go swimming every day, the first time Adam's had a proper go at it in the ocean, glad he doesn't have to unlearn anything, lets his legs do most of the work and finds an equilibrium with his left arm.

The water is a brutally cold and reviving shock each morning, despite the clear late-summer weather. Jo burns immediately and makes her mom buy her an industrial size tub of sunscreen on the next trip into town; Adam and Ellen slowly brown together, comparing each morning their arms, this day Ellen bronze as a shell, this day Adam darkening through like a tree root. They cook fresh fish stuffed with herbs and lemon on a grill over an open fire and drink Sunrises overfull of cheap vodka. They wash the plates with sand the first night, trying to save themselves lugging in extra water, and the next morning Adam eats his own bodyweight in grit.

Ellen tells them stories even Jo has never heard before, about Jo's wildcard father who once ran down a minor god on three-day foot chase that ended up crossing the border into Canada; he taught Ellen to hunt, long ago, back when demons were barely heard of. She tells them about the time she and William pissed off a vampire nest so much they brought in a hitman, and how they'd shot him full of silver bullets before realising their categorical mistake. 

He and Jo match insults and drinking and race along the hard wet sand while Ellen reads her paperbacks, Christie and P. D. James and Twain. He wins the first race, shifting his arms into clean even lines, feels deep muscles compensate the weight imbalance, his legs already tired from swimming blasting through the first pain barrier and taking him past the driftwood finish line, Jo at his heels. He laughs breathlessly in victory.

Jo is outraged and thrashes him on the way back, her ponytail bouncing out mockingly behind her. He pushes it to the end though, sharp pain in his side, and she shakes his hand graciously. 

“You've got good form Adam,” Ellen says, and he feels such a sudden upswell of baffled pride that it makes his eyes tear, his lips pull back as though in pain. He turns around and watches the waves seep into their churned up footprints, rubbing and soothing them away.

::

They exhume a body in the cemetery of a ghost town, middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, just a church and a gas station and thirteen boarded up houses. Rufus sent them down there, some distant cousin of his in the next town over mentioning a rash of unexplained deaths.

They're digging up old Maureen Emerson who after being in the ground nigh on thirty years had recently taken to burning passers-through alive in their cars. Adam's on guard duty, rock-salt shotgun at the ready, but Maureen's not showing, only sounds crickets and shovels thumping into the dirt behind him, Ellen's earthy grunts. They've just gotten down to their knees and Adam has the feeling they'll be going a lot longer. They'd buried them deep in this town. 

Jo stands and stretches her back, wiping at her face, pushing at flyaway hair, leaving another long streak of mud across her forehead. He grins at her.

“Enjoying yourself?” 

She purses her lips and shakes her head, pissed.

“Come down here and say that, you'll be digging with your teeth.”

“Lucky the ground's nice and soft.”

“Lucky I let you live.”

“You gonna let your sainted mother do all the digging, Miss Yap?” says Ellen, and curses at her lost rhythm, rolls her shoulders. Jo draws her finger across her neck and points at Adam, vengeance in her eyes, and turns back to her work as Adam laughs.

They keep at their digging and he keeps his watch, on into the night as the star-ridden sky blazes down at him, endless and ineffable and broadly accepting, fields strewn about him like they'd fallen there, punctuated by the ghostly weatherboard church. He's never been here before, and maybe he never will be again, but this is his land now, in some small way, and Jo and Ellen's too, as they pass through and massage out its traumas, iron out its wrinkles. And all around are the places he's been and the places he's going, pulled on through their own small nights and days, his kin in those towns kissing their girlfriends and playing with their kids and talking without knowing it to an angel of the Lord, without knowing that they all of them owe their lives to Adam's brothers, and his friends. 

And in the middle of it all there is this routine salt-and-burn of a woman who could only be satiated by suffering, her husband now murdered, her children grown and gone and a world of emptiness flowering inside her, or what remained of her. He feels sorry for her in a way, can sympathise with how mercilessly death strips you out, how thin it renders you once it's taken what it wants. And to be a ghost already when that happens; he's not surprised she went the way she did, no one else to fall into, no one else to make yourself against. 

He never knew when it was just his mom and him what that meant, what it meant that he could smile with her over some shared joke on the TV and feel such an exquisite heart-burning love, overwhelming in its laser-sharp adoration. In retrospect, he can see that what made it so fierce was fear; he recognises it in Ellen's eyes, all the time, watches her feel it and treasure it and put it away and move through into the next moment, open and accepting. His brothers had managed that too, he thinks, maybe near the end, teaching each other peace; and his mom had maybe always had it, and didn't have the chance to teach him, taken too early and too painfully, far too painfully, but thinking of her he is learning it: to be as welcoming as the sky and wide land and women by his side.

::

 

The end.

**Author's Note:**

> MORE INFORMATION re: WARNINGS:  
> Sam and Dean disappear, possibly die; their whereabouts remain unconfirmed.
> 
> Feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/131344951021/gamble-on-a-little-sorrow-39140-words-by)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for "Gamble on a Little Sorrow"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/849236) by [Gryph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gryph/pseuds/Gryph)




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